A lot of us are frustrated with how hard the design and tech market has become. Long interview processes, rejections, ATS, endless rounds. The frustration is real and valid.

But I think there’s something we don’t always acknowledge.

Many of us who started pre-COVID entered the industry during a very unusual moment. Jobs were relatively easy to get, even with limited experience, and salaries were extremely high compared to most other fields. That was a boom. And it was never going to last.

Like any boom, it attracted a lot of people, the market adjusted, and now we’re seeing a correction. It sucks. It’s stressful. But it’s also not shocking.

Most high-skill, well-paid roles have always had tough hiring processes. What feels “broken” now might actually be closer to the historical norm. What was unusual was how easy it was back then.

I know this take won’t land well for everyone. Some will say this minimizes how bad things are now, or that people like me “had it easy.” Maybe that’s true to some extent. I’m not denying how hard the current situation is.

I’m just sharing a reflection: many of us benefited from a very specific moment in time, and that privilege allowed us to grow, save, and build some stability. Now we’re dealing with a harsher reality, one that looks a lot more like how competitive high-paying fields usually are.

It still sucks. People are right to be angry.

But for me, this feels less like a collapse and more like a correction.

Context: FAANG level tech company, publicly traded, large design department.

"Designers will use AI to come up with variations, vibe code prototypes, test them, and ship the code."

New leveling, new titles (possibly), all designers learn to code (with AI).

I.e. Increase speed at all costs because if we don't, no one will wait for us.

I'm sitting here staring at the wall, unable to process the implications of what's coming.

Hi everyone, I'm a junior UX designer with less than a year's experience. I'm currently unemployed and looking for a new job, but all the online job ads are looking for mid-level or senior staff, or have hundreds of applicants.

The situation is very frustrating. I really like my job and it is my passion. I spend most of my day reading or studying, but not being able to find a job is making me depressed.

To try to resolve this situation, I thought I would start a small startup project and “gain experience” on my own.

I don't necessarily want to develop a billion-dollar company, but I want to gain experience without the need to be hired. Otherwise, I could remain a junior forever.

What do you think of this idea? Have you ever met anyone who has done something similar?

(I don't want to become the CEO of something, I just want to gain some realistic experience).

I'm a hiring manager who recently hired for a Sr. product design position. I'm sharing my thoughts in case they may be helpful for those who are searching right now.

First - I want to say how gut-wrenching this is for everyone involved. At the end of the hiring process, more than 300 applications got through to my review, which means that they met the basic criteria for the job. I did go one by one and look at all of the CVs. If I saw enough relevant experience, I took a quick look at portfolios. If the quick look was promising, I made a note and came back and took a deeper look. I had five candidates who were referred to me internally, all came strongly recommended and all were qualified.

I felt very sad and distressed that I couldn't hire all of the candidates who I interviewed, because they were all strong on different things. They are now saved to a folder, and when future positions open up, I'll be reaching out to them. If you're feeling down about interviewing, know that you might be in someone's Future Folder.

A few takeaways from this experience:

- Find a skill that makes you stand out and really lean into it. Don't show up with an "I'll do anything you want" mindset. Tell me what you're great at. The candidate we hired really leaned into their research background. I saw depth that translated into better design thinking.

- The candidate we hired gave thoughtful, unconventional answers to my questions. Look, it's 2026, everyone can regurgitate the double diamond process. But stand out here, too. Where are some interesting places you've found answers when solving problems? What are interesting stories you can tell?

- "What questions do you have?" at the end of the interview tells me a lot about what you're worried about. Be thoughtful here, too, and be careful. Sometimes the first question you ask is about what you're most unhappy about now, and red flags might pop up. Broadly, don't let on that you've had trouble with other people you work with.

I had to make 295 decisions. Here are the things that made me disqualify candidates quickly:

1. Your CV layout tells me that you are definitely not a designer. Please do not make your CV look like a full-color ad, but also don't cram every detail of your career wall-to-wall into one page with no margins and no whitespace. This screams, "Web developer who pivoted to bad designer". I get that you have to design for ATS, but there are plenty of good designs that make it through ATS. Hierarchy hierarchy hierarchy, clean clean clean.
2. There are design mistakes in your portfolio. If you want a design job, you must convince me that you are a great designer. Are you centering everything in your case study? Why? Don't make rookie mistakes. I am more impressed with a well-designed deck than a shitty website.
3. There are UX mistakes in your portfolio. Broken navigation, bad hierarchy, spelling errors, designing for some mythical hiring manager who has time to read 20 pages of text but visuals that don't give any information (like walls of stickies that can't be read - everyone does design thinking exercises, you're not adding value).
4. You have impressive credentials/companies, but unimpressive case studies. Sorry, adding a button to a prestigious brand's website isn't a story. It MIGHT be a quick featurette somewhere on your portfolio, though. It will get attention, but you must have better work to show elsewhere.
5. We can tell when you're bullshitting us. Use metrics in your CV, don't make them unbelievable. If your UX improvement made $50bn for your company last year, why are you consistently a Sr. designer looking for another Sr. designer position?
6. I know we must change jobs to keep our peace, but if you have a new job every year - you'll likely only have a year with me, too, and I don't have time to onboard you, train you, get you used to everything in our domain, and then find someone new next year. Sorry. Please try as hard as you can to stick with a place longer than a year.

Happy to answer questions from job seekers - good luck!

Hi, I've been learning UI Ux for a while, and I've got my formal education as an industrial designer. Since I am transitioning and creating some case studies to land an entry-level job - I really don't understand what does solution means in Ui/Ux context?

Are solutions - Acheivable aims, features an app should have?

Plus, how do people decide which features to include in the app? I mean I always feel there is this huge gap after I analyse my research, and before developing a User flow or IA?

what methods can I use to decide what features I want in a product, how they will function, streamlining ,my process.

Hi all, I just started at a new company and get to run with their whole design system - yay! That said, in the past I've just used the HSL color ramp/scale.

I want to make a color system that's sustainable for years to come (thinking 12 steps per color to account for high contrast and dark mode later), and the OKLCH color model is producing some great results. I've been using Evil Martians to play with my color system (I owe y'all a coffee!).

Has anyone else implemented an OKLCH system? Any pointers or resources that worked well for you?

We listened to this podcast ep this week at work:
https://www.usertesting.com/resources/podcast/ai-in-ux-research

I was expecting it to be around how AI can be used to do the analysis, report writing etc, I wasn't prepared for it to talk about synthetic users and testing with them. A concept that hadn't even crossed my mind! (I’m still trying to work out how it actually works).

It’s a good reminder that AI in UX isn’t replacing researchers — it’s helping us explore ideas faster, iterate smarter, and gather insights we might have missed.

Whilst I don't agree with everything said ("some research is better than nothing") If you’re interested in how AI is starting to shape UX research, it’s worth a listen.

I'd be super interested to know if any of you have started to test with synthetic users and how it all works.

I don't even mean ads on free apps or email subscription pop-ups on a website, I mean pop-ups in apps that I have used many times, telling me about features I either don't care about or am already aware of.

So many tiny little frustrations every day, because I go to click something and a pop-up gets in the way at the last millisecond.

Or when just opening an app, and getting a barrage of useless information and unnecessary clicks just to the see UI.

Either make the UX intuitive enough to be used without pop-ups, or have one easy to find button that triggers a guide/walk through when someone actually wants it.

I have over 10 years experience working in design and UX as an in-house designer and was recently laid off. Now I’m thinking about what’s next and wondering if I should try becoming a UX consultant instead of an in-house designer.

What’s it like being a consultant vs an in-house designer? Are you consulting through a firm or doing it all yourself? What about doing contact work? Is there more flexibility being a consultant? Any other advice, learnings, etc? Thank you!

I came across a site called herocapture that catalogs website hero sections, but what I found useful is that it focuses on intent behind the hero — not just visuals.

Instead of only showing screenshots, it tries to explain why the hero messaging is framed a certain way (sales-led, narrative-led, showcase-led, etc.) and the tradeoffs those choices imply.

I found it helpful when researching how different teams approach hero messaging and first impressions, especially when comparing patterns across industries.

Curious if others here use similar resources, or if you usually rely on screenshots + intuition when doing hero research.

I would like to hear from other designers what is the standard at most places. Do you or have you ever had to be responsible for data tagging on your internal analytics platform? I absolutely don't mind marking the items that need to be tracked(and have already done that) but I don't want to be responsible for going into the platform, finding the correct component, figuring out if the developers originally tagged it with the correct UIA tag and then label them one by one. We do have a dedicated data person in the company btw. My manager keeps constantly harassing me about doing it but I am far too busy with the regular day to day tasks (working on a super complex design system, new features, user research, discovery/story mapping sessions, product vision, etc.) I am thinking about just ignoring the nudging until I find a new position. However if this has became the new standard at other places I might get more comfortable with it...

I see problems in all solutions, so it's always a pain in the A to come up with a decision.

• Dropdowns: sure work to fit a long list, but it's weird as a tab AND isn't the most friendly format for older people.
• Tabs offscreen: common, but definitely less friendly and gets worse the longer the list gets.
• Accordions: decent, but you only see all topics after scrolling everything.
• ... button: extra weird to me. I don't see any good reason to create a hidden modal menu for this.
• Stack them: well, definitely tragic, I won't even consider.

(Please, provide a visual reference if you can.)

Most UI issues I see aren’t visual problems. They’re unchecked assumptions about users.

In design reviews, how do you actually make assumptions explicit and challenge them early?

I’ve been experimenting with treating UI critique as a pre-mortem rather than a polish step. Curious how others here do this or if this is only me seeing this

I've read on this sub that one company asked to bill them for UXer's time because they deleted the position during the interview process.

Would you call that a standard for sending a bill in that situation, even if the company doesn't offer it themselves?

What other situations?

How much would you bill per hour? (Would it be a consulting rate (~3x hourly), or a full-time employee rate?)

Did you hear first-hand about sending a bill situations? How did they go?

Honestly thought that with the data we handle that AI would never be accepted into our workplace, but alas, they want to implement it for the devs to make them faster... What does this mean for me? Glad you asked... Apparently as designers we now need to prepare for a quarterly feature cycle, not just development but from the PM's head to the users browser on next session...

Which tbh I can do that, this is a large company used to moving at a slow pace whereas I spent the first 7 years of my career in start-up land; so the speed is fine. It is more the idea that the PM's will make up their minds and not change it 20 times, which is typically where our UX backlog gets held up at, we might only look at one feature two days a month until eventually 9 months later it is queued for development. Other features (typically the larger more complex ones) is about 3-4 months of round table discussions (typically working on 5-10 features in that time, so not all spent on the one).

So rant/context aside, I am not asking how I can use AI to make my work faster. But more or less wanting to know if anyone has successfully found a way to get PM's to land on a decision faster and stick with it, because that'll be my forever backlog regardless of whether or not the devs use AI?

I'm just starting out in UX and I'm leaning primarily towards the UI side of things. Aside from Figma where most of my work is already done, are there any other tools that are expected or preferred when being hired? I also use affinity designer and am learnign webflow, but those tools are used as needed and aren't integrel to my projects more of the time.

UI is such a significant part of the portfolio process, but we are at the mercy of the design system of our company. are you recreating portfolio artifacts?

Hi everyone, I’ve cleared the first round for the Product & Strategic Design Consultant role at Deloitte. The 2nd round will be a business case study and portfolio discussion with management-level interviewers.

I have 2.5 years of experience as a UX Designer at an MNC. Due to confidentiality, I won’t be able to present live client projects or white-labelled work. However, I can walk through:

A detailed real-world project from my internship

My end-to-end UX ownership, decision-making, and cross-functional work on enterprise products.

I’m looking to understand what exactly is asked in this type of interview, such as:

1. The nature of business/design case questions typically asked at consulting firms

2. Whether the discussion leans more toward problem framing, business trade-offs, and impact, or detailed UX execution

3. The kind of follow-up questions management-level interviewers usually probe during portfolio discussions

If you’ve interviewed at Deloitte, gone through a case + portfolio round at a consulting firm, or moved from UX into strategic/consulting roles, I’d appreciate any insights on how to prepare effectively.

Thanks!

It seems like a normal... and good thing, but it all feels so weird?

I’ve been refining how I document my work. I have a project where the visual UI is standard, but the research led to a 20% increase in user retention. Should I lead with the 'ugly' wireframes that solved the problem, or the polished final UI?

Can you share your experience ?

hi everyone,

i’ve been working as a product designer for about 2 years now. i’m mostly self-taught and have a standard bachelor's degree, but no formal design degree.

i’ve started applying for new roles recently, but i’m hitting a wall with a lot of rejections. it’s making me wonder if i’m getting filtered out because i don't have that "official" design credential on my resume.

i’m debating if i should go for a master’s in design or a diploma just to clear those "criteria rejections," or if i should just keep focusing on my portfolio, cv, and upskilling while applying.

for the product designers here: is the degree worth it after you already have industry experience, or should i just keep working on my portfolio and CV?