UX design

UX design

That's when it hit me: I'd been so busy debating whether AI would replace designers that I'd missed the obvious question - how could it just make my Tuesday nights less miserable? Fast-forward eight months, and 59% of designers and developers are already using AI in their work. But here's what the surveys don't tell you: the gap between AI hype and AI reality in design work is still enormous.

Designers often spend time learning tools, shortcuts, and workflows. Today, those tools are easier than ever to pick up. Anyone can learn Figma in a matter of weeks, and AI is further lowering the barrier. But tools don't make a designer great. What separates the average from the exceptional is taste, the ability to see why a design works and to make decisions that elevate your own work.

The thing is, the company I was working for had a dedicated photo team that provided beautiful, high-quality images with numerous contextual and action shots, perfect for web pages. So when what came to my desk was a classic full-page hero of an image with a gradient, I wasn't exactly surprised. But it did frustrate me that we couldn't come up with something more bold.

In 2016, I presented at @Roblox Indie Game Developer Meetup about design strategy as an indie developer. Back then, I had no idea children as young as 5 were interacting with random adults on their platform. Today, the same company (NYSE: $RBLX) is filled with poorly moderated "games" like Bathroom Simulator and worse - all while letting adults animate their avatars for sexual role play.

I want my designer to be intimately aware of both customer feedback and how money flows through a system. Design is becoming more engineering-focused with new tools, but designers should really focus on Product-Market Fit. A CEO told me this in an interview, which mirrors what I've heard from design leaders. While everyone's talking about "vibe coding" and designer-developer hybrids, executives are quietly looking for something else: designers who think strategically.

As a longtime Linux user, my opinion of the Windows UI has never really wavered: I think it's pretty dismal. Given that Linux has a cornucopia of desktop environments from which to choose, it makes perfect sense that someone who enjoys a good aesthetic would look at Windows and snub it like a cat snubs the new food you just bought.

Recently, I was asked to work on a platform for an industry facing real headwinds. Layoffs and overwork have left many people drained, and the question from the client was simple but profound: can design ease some of that mental burden for the people using our platform? Not with gimmicks or forced fun, but with subtle sparks of relief. When we talk about ease, two factors consistently emerge in both psychology and design research:

Where do we stand now? Emotions run high and some feel strong about the one solution to our current predicament. Designers that are strong visual designers say: taste will save us. It's the last frontier in our fight with AI. With endless options generated by AI, someone will still need to decide which option is best. That would be us, with taste as our unfair advantage.

Real-time dashboards are decision assistants, not passive displays. In environments like fleet management, healthcare, and operations, the cost of a delay or misstep is high. Karan Rawal explores strategic UX patterns that shorten time-to-decision, reduce cognitive overload, and make live systems trustworthy. I once worked with a fleet operations team that monitored dozens of vehicles in multiple cities. Their dashboard showed fuel consumption, live GPS locations, and real-time driver updates.

After 18 years in the field, here's the truth about how great products are really built. You've seen the diagrams. They're clean, they're confident, and they're plastered on the walls of agencies, startups, and design schools around the world. A perfect, linear path: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test. Or maybe it's the elegant loops of the double diamond, diverging and converging in a beautiful, predictable dance.

During our user testing sessions, I watched one participant solve complex spatial puzzles in under ten seconds while expressing frustration that the game wasn't challenging them enough. Twenty minutes later, another participant struggled with what I considered the simplest tutorial level. Both users had the same diagnosis. Both were part of our target demographic. But their cognitive strengths and challenges were completely different.

When 252 participants rated each version, the results were clear: screens that looked more attractive were consistently judged as easier to use. The correlation between beauty and perceived usability was strong ( r = 0.589), while functional factors showed almost no link. The researchers called this gap apparent usability versus inherent usability. Their conclusion: users don't judge ease of use by logic alone - appearance biases perception. This became known as the aesthetic-usability effect: if it looks better, it feels better.

Cars have evolved far beyond simple transportation, becoming mobile offices, entertainment centers, and quiet retreats from the chaos of daily life. Yet most automotive interiors remain frustratingly static, designed around assumptions about how everyone should use their vehicle rather than adapting to individual needs and preferences. Fengrui Wang's Xiaomi Flowing Oasis concept, developed as a thesis project at TU Delft, takes a radically different approach by reimagining the car interior as a modular, user-customizable sanctuary.

Design Systems have hundreds (sometimes thousands) of design tokens, complex UI components, as well as guidelines for usage-making it easy to feel buried in the workload. That's why creating an audit structure upfront is so important. In this stage, you'll set the scope of the audit, select tools to use, and identify the accessibility standards to measure your Design System with.

UX designers frequently work in ambiguous spaces, most notably the discovery phase. We collaborate closely with product managers to identify new problems, understand users' goals and frustrations, and strategically develop solutions to address their needs. However, the best solutions aren't always straightforward, and with AI being embedded in every new product and feature, it makes things a bit more challenging. Just as we get comfortable using AI, something changes or evolves. This makes AI features unpredictable and difficult to document requirements for.

Google is testing alternatives to the title "People also search for" at the bottom of the Google Search results. I am seeing "Related your search," "Search for next," and "Also search for." I am sure there are more. I was tipped off to the "Also search for" variation by Sachin Patel on X but I am able to replicate all of these, here are my screenshots.

"UX in AI" has become one of the most confusing buzzwords in our industry. Jakob Nielsen has famously talked about how UX is desperately needed for AI, but few can define what this means (or how to do it). Is it about designing chat interfaces and chatbots? Is it about working with algorithms or vibe coding? Is it about using Replit and Bolt instead of Figma?

Poorly designed support flows frustrate users, but smart, intentional redesigns can turn a help center into an intuitive, self-service space that feels like a natural extension of the product. This improves the customer experience while reducing live support needs and helping internal teams spot common problems and solutions. Help centers are no longer afterthoughts; they're now core to digital product experiences and key drivers of user satisfaction, retention, and brand trust.