r/userexperience

I’m going to keep this short. The utility I find in AI as it relates to UX is in the following:

- Synthesizing information (research, meetings, specs, etc.)

- Brainstorming alternatives (“analyze these explorations and expand my thinking/help me diverge a bit”)

- Generating a prototype from an existing design (this one is actually pretty cool in its ability to create prototype logic and synthetic data that would normally take ages manually)

- Generating documentation (design specs, research protocols) but SPOILER, this tends to be AI slop that looks convincing enough

As far as the meat and potatoes of true UX: problem identification, problem framing, and solution generation, I truly do not see the hype with AI. It’s incredibly slow, myopic, and difficult to iterate on (hallucinations, lack of adherence to a design system, etc.).

I like to compare UX to entrepreneurship: the identification and solving of problems that have some sort of economic impact. If it were so simple to use AI to achieve those UX goals, why can’t I ask ChatGPT to help me find and implement the next million dollar idea at the drop of a hat?

Go ahead, try it and get back to me :)

I sincerely think most of the hype around AI being able to replace all knowledge workers is done by agents and bots created by people who have a stake in this game. To those people, I send you a resounding F*** You from the deepest wellsprings of my being.

Source: 6 years of experience and critical thinking in design

We do usability testing quarterly, 6-8 participants. By the time we recruit, run sessions and present findings it's been 3-4 weeks and the product moved on. Also getting pushback asking if "8 people is enough to change the roadmap."

Im looking for tools that let us do continuous research at scale, watching real users in the wild rather than lab sessions. Specifically for mobile since web tools don't capture mobile interactions well. Anyone found a good middle ground?

We're doing a proper tool evaluation and I want to make sure I'm asking the right questions rather than just comparing feature checklists. Our use case is a consumer mobile app, ios and android, about 150k MAU. Main things we care about: understanding where users get confused, why specific flows have high drop off, and being able to share findings with stakeholders without them needing to log into yet another dashboard.

Smartlook has been on our radar but between the cisco acquisition and the direction things seem to be heading, we're not sure it makes sense to build on it long term. UXCam looks like a great alternative. What do people who've done this evaluation look for that isn't obvious from the marketing pages?

I could use some career advice on choosing between roles at the same company (early career, research-focused)

I recently applied for a Market Researcher role in my current state but a different city and have a phone screen coming up. After applying, I discovered two other roles at the same company that I’m honestly more interested in:

• Product Research & Strategy Analyst (different state that I'm highly open to relocating to)

• UX Designer (different state that I'm highly open to relocating to)

Background: I’m early in my career with a strong interest in UX research and strategy. I have experience with user research methods (interviews, usability testing, synthesis), but I’m still growing on the design side. I’m more drawn to research and insight-driven work than pure design execution.

Here’s where I’m stuck:

The Market Researcher role seems more customer outreach / lead evaluation focused. It’s solid, but maybe not directly aligned with UX research.

The Product Research & Strategy Analyst role seems much closer to Ux research + strategy, just focused on products and suppliers instead of users.

The UX Designer role includes research, but it’s clearly still a design-heavy role, and I’m not sure I’m competitive there yet and/ or have a passion for design.

Complicating things:

- I’m open to relocating and put my address as a family members in the city the Market Research position is in. Although I don't currently live there, I am looking to relocate soon.

The roles I feel closely align to my long term career goals are also in a dream location and I would see myself there long term.

My questions:

1. During the phone screen, is it smart to bring up interest in the other roles, or should I stay fully focused on the Market Researcher position?

2. From a career trajectory standpoint, which role would best position someone for UX research or product strategy long-term?

3. Would it look unfocused to pivot toward a different role mid-process, even within the same company?

Appreciate any perspectives, especially from people in UX, product research, etc.

been looking at a bunch of creator economy apps lately, mostly AI video and content tools, and I keep noticing how different the navigation approaches are. some go really minimal, hide half the options behind gestures or hamburger menus, feel clean but I always find myself hunting for things. others put everything up front with labeled tabs and it feels a bit cluttered at first but I actually get stuff done faster. I reckon for apps where the core loop is create, edit, export, you probably want everything visible and reachable. like if someone's mid-flow trying to find the export button, that's not the moment for a hidden drawer. but I could also see the argument that too many visible options just adds noise for newer users still figuring out the basics. maybe I'm overthinking this but it feels like creator apps have a specific problem where power, users and beginners share the same nav, and those two groups probably want pretty different things. a power user who's done fifty exports knows exactly where everything lives. a new user is still building that mental model and a cluttered tab bar might just stress them out before they've even made anything. I've been wondering if progressive disclosure is the actual answer here, like start minimal and surface more options as someone completes actions or hits certain milestones. but I've also seen that done badly where it just feels like the app is hiding things from you for no reason. curious if anyone's actually tested explicit vs minimal nav in this kind of app context. did discoverability improve with more visible options or did it just overwhelm people early on. and has anyone seen progressive disclosure actually work well in a create-edit-export flow without it feeling patronizing to the user.

Hi all,

I’ve got a final-stage interview for a UX Design Intern role at a mid-sized AI company, and the format is a portfolio discussion over Zoom with two UX designers.

I’d really appreciate some input on how to position my case studies.

Context:

- My portfolio includes 2–3 projects (including a speculative design project and a real client project)

- My earlier work is weaker in terms of formal UX rigour (e.g. limited user interviews, minimal quantitative validation)

- A lot of my decisions are based on design reasoning rather than strong empirical data

- I’ve improved significantly over the last couple of years, so I can clearly see what I should have done differently

My dilemma:

I’ve had conflicting advice.

One perspective (from a senior solution architect, not UX) is:

- Don’t highlight weaknesses. Present what you did well and let them probe if they want.

My instinct (UX-focused) is:

- Walk through the project (problem > process > decisions > outcome)

- Then explicitly reflect on limitations (e.g. lack of research, constraints, what I’d improve)

- Basically show critical thinking and growth

My concern is:

If I don’t acknowledge gaps (like lack of research or data), and they ask “why didn’t you validate this?”, my only answer is realistically time/inexperience, which feels weak.

But if I pre-empt that too strongly, I worry I’m undermining my own work.

Questions:

1. In a final-stage UX portfolio interview, how much should you proactively surface weaknesses vs wait to be asked?

2. How do you frame “I didn’t have research/data” without it sounding like poor practice?

3. Is it better to lead with confidence and only reflect if prompted, or to build reflection into the case study narrative?

4. What do senior UX designers actually look for in these discussions, process, outcomes, or reasoning?

Any practical phrasing examples would be really helpful.

Thanks

Genuine question because at this point I'm one tab overload away from printing everything out and drawing with crayons.

Working on this feature that spans onboarding, dashboard, settings, some modals, and a confirmation flow that loops back to the start. Stakeholders want the full user journey visualized so they can pretend they understand it without actually clicking through.
Tried Figma. Great for one screen, turns into a sprawling mess of artboards and arrows when you try to show the whole path. Prototype it? Sure, but now it's a 5 minute demo just to walk the journey and half the room zones out after 30 seconds.
Whimsical or Excalidraw? Feels lighter but still ends up as clickfest or static images that don't capture decisions or edge cases.

Pen and paper? Tried it, scanned it, shared it. PM lost it in their 47 browser tabs and asked for a Figma link anyway.
My current hack is a single mega-canvas in Figma with frames linked by prototypes, numbered steps, and color coded paths for happy/sad/error flows. Takes 4 hours to build, looks like I threw up a flowchart, and still gets 'can you make it interactive?'

Meanwhile competitors just ship the damn feature while I'm here playing PowerPoint for executives who think journeys are straight lines.

Hit me with what works before I start wireframing in Excel.

I’ve been thinking about why UX and research firms like Qualtrics have become so keen on synthetic data. When they started pivoting to synthetic data, the justification was efficiency and democratisation. The underlying story seems a bit different.

Companies like Qualtrics introduce synthetic data as the baseline, clients know it’s not reliable enough for serious decisions so they look for ways to de-risk it, and the natural answer becomes a hybrid model. Real customer insights, which used to be the default, become a discretionary upgrade.

Firms advertise lower entry-level pricing, which is technically true, but anyone serious about their research ends up using a hybrid option.

Real customer insights, which used to be the default, become a discretionary upgrade.

Over time, real customer research shifts from baseline to optional premium tier. What was standard becomes luxury. It’s about understanding that once you give people a cheaper-but-risky option, they’ll pay extra to remove the risk. This whole things seems like a pricing re-baselining exercise for research...

Most mobile apps support a swipe-right gesture to go back. Shouldn't there be a corresponding swipe-left gesture to go forward?

I'm thinking specifically of long-scrolling apps like Bluesky/Reddit. I often find myself, say, clicking on a user's feed and scrolling down for a while to look at it. And then, because I'm scrolling with my right thumb, it accidentally moves to the right a little, and the app goes back, completely losing my place. It would be great to be able to return there with a swipe-left.

But I've rarely seen a forward gesture outside of a browser....the only one I can think of is Reeder for iOS. Is there a reason this isn't used more often?

A new preprint of a literature review was just published.

Based on the article (covering the preprint), synthetic participants generated by LLMs fundamentally do not work as replacement for human participants. While LLMs can generate text that looks like participant data, they fail to replicate actual human cognition, emotion, or lived experience.

As someone who often builds by myself on limited budgets, user testing ends up being a huge time/cost burden that I really want to overcome. Are there any other viable approaches in the early stages where expensive human testing is not feasible? Can agentic testing help at all?

For reference, I really enjoyed the few User Brain sessions I've done (although $50/session hurts after a while), and I enjoyed Synthetic Users purely for the entertainment value of watching an agent struggle with a touch-oriented website.

edit: can't decide if my flair should be strategy or junior question...

Hey everyone,

I'm a Product Designer doing an MA in UX Design at Falmouth University. For a module project, I'm building a practical framework to help product teams think through the ethical implications of AI features, especially in B2B tools.

I'd love to get real practitioner perspectives to ground this in how things actually work (or don't) in practice. The survey is completely anonymous, takes 3-5 minutes, and is only used for this academic project.

Who should take it: Anyone who works on digital products: designers, PMs, engineers, researchers. You don't need to work specifically on AI features; if you work in tech, your perspective is valuable.

Thank you so much in advance!

Built an iOS app solo, the UX feels functional but not polished enough. How do you identify and fix UX weak spots without user testing budget? And is there any ai tools you would recommended that would potentially help with that?

Research methodology question. When your app has 200,000 users, any qualitative work you do is by definition a sample. Interview 20 people. Watch 50 sessions. Run a card sort with 30 participants.

I've never been fully comfortable with the assumption that findings from a small sample generalize to the full user population. Especially when the users who agree to participate in research are probably systematically different from typical users.

How do practitioners here think about the validity problem? Is there a principled way to know when your qualitative sample is representative enough? Or is it more of a judgment call based on whether findings are consistent across the sample?

The Claude team made one of the dumbest product decisions I've seen in a while. And nobody's talking about it.

They literally built their design to trigger you into chatting. That warm orange on the send button, the plus icon... that wasn't random, that was intentional UX. It creates a subconscious "go ahead, press it" moment. And it worked. People were chatting more, coming back more.

Then they decided they want enterprise clients. Cool. So they went full minimalist, swapped out their brand colors for generic grey nothing... and quietly killed that psychological nudge. That one small thing that made you want to send just one more message.

And with it, a lot of people just... drifted off.

What gets me is the logic. Or the lack of it. Enterprise buyers don't choose AI tools because the send button is grey. They choose based on capability and trust. But the actual daily users... the ones who built Claude's reputation through word of mouth... they respond to feel. And you just made it feel like every other boring SaaS tool.

You onboarded me on the old design. I got hooked on the old design. Don't change it and expect the same behavior. That's not how habits work.

Stick with what got people in the door. PERIOD.

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I’ve been helping some local artists organize pop-up workshops in small spaces around the city. People just show up when they see the event online, but it’s tricky to manage who can fit, when supplies run out, and how to make the experience smooth for everyone.

I’m not technical at all, so figuring out the flow of the app, how attendees sign up, confirm space, get notified if a spot opens, and how the artists see it all at a glance has been a huge challenge.

I’ve been sketching ideas and testing simple prototypes with friends, and going through resources like i have an app idea. It has helped me think about flows and interactions from a non-technical perspective. It’s not perfect and lil bit simple, but it covers some of my major concerns for building.

How would you design an experience like this where people can drop in unexpectedly, and the artist needs to manage it quickly? Anyone dealt with apps for live, small-scale events before?

Did a research study recently where I combined user interviews with actual screen flow data from the same users over a two week period. Wanted to see how well self-reported behavior matched actual behavior.

The gap was pretty uncomfortable. In interviews, people described a linear, intentional navigation pattern. "I open the app, go to X, do Y, close it." Clean, purposeful, confident.

The actual flows: lots of backtracking, screens revisited multiple times, features tapped and immediately backed out of, long pauses in unexpected places. Not what anyone described. Not even close.

Nobody was lying. They genuinely believed their description was accurate. But the mental model of their own behavior was a cleaned-up, post-rationalized version of what actually happened.

This is why I've become increasingly skeptical of interview-only research for navigation and information architecture work. People are good at explaining why they did things. They're not good at accurately remembering the sequence of what they actually did.