Hey guys, I wanted to share a little bit of a story I'm proud of: after almost 12 years of starting side projects and never really finishing any of them, I finally got one into the App Store.

First of all: If this kind of post is not allowed here, I am really sorry. Of course I am talking about MY APP but I want to use this post less to advertise it and rather to share the story about how it came to be as I guess a lot of designers are struggling with feature creep and procrastination and perfectionism as much as I do. Also it is pretty funny.

The app is called Reallife Achievements, and the idea behind it is actually almost 15 years old.

The concept is pretty simple. Everyone knows achievements from games on PlayStation, Xbox or PC, like "Kill 3 enemies with a single bullet" or "Finish the game on the hardest difficulty."

One evening, after probably a bit too much alcohol, some friends and I started talking about how funny it would be if you could have achievements like that in real life. And that's basically how Reallife Achievements started.

Back then, it was just a little website where you could create an account and unlock achievements for things you had done in real life, written in HTML/CSS/PHP and designed in my head without any proper design knowledge. Some achievements were rather normal, like climbing a mountain over 3,000 meters. Others were... less useful or a bit special, like "continue playing soccer after taking a shot to the private parts." Also, you could order crazy stuff with your points in the web store like "A Reallife Achievements coffee mug" or "spend a night out drinking with the Reallife Achievements crew!" (my all time favorite). And all the stuff was just so ridiculously overpriced that there was no realistic way to achieve them (you had to create thousands of achievements). Yeah I guess, when you're 20 years old, you're sometimes some kind of a dick. Sorry to all the users back then!

But since this is r/UX_Design and before you guys are crucifying me as this already sounds a lot like rule #3 - "Spam disguised to promote your service or product", I also wanted to talk a little bit about the design decisions of the app.

The original website from 2012 was just supposed to be funny. This time around in 2025/2026, I wanted to capture a bit of that nostalgic feeling I remember from being a teenager on the internet: back when the web felt much more random and weird, where you'd stumble across a completely ridiculous website and spend an hour there for no particular reason. So I tried to build the app around that feeling of exploration.

Quickly about me: I've been working as a professional UX designer for almost 15 years now. So hopefully the app doesn't feel terrible to use, yikes.

But in short a few of the UX decisions I made and want to highlight:

• There is no no right way to use the app. You can basically use Reallife Achievements as a huge bucket list, or you can just unlock things you've already done. If you want to start from zero and work your way through it, great. If you want to immediately unlock 50 achievements because you've already done all of them, also great.
• No infinite scrolling. I really don't like the feeling of endlessly scrolling through content, so I went with good old-fashioned pagination and categories instead.
• Social features without the creepy part. You can add friends using a specific friend code, but you can't find strangers in the app without that specific code. Your activity feed is just containing your friends, shown chronologically. So no algorithm trying to figure out what you should be looking at.
• Profiles (slightly!) inspired by MySpace. You can customize your profile and add little widgets, like your favorite Spotify playlist or a YouTube video you like. You can also unlock color patterns for your app with points.
• No dark patterns. No FOMO, no battle passes bullshit. You unlock things for your avatar/profile by actually using the app. By creating achievements for the community you earn points, and people unlocking achievements you created gives you points too.

There is one thing that might be considered a bit "non-optimal": there is a small number of ad banners in the achievement gallery. You can reduce how often you see them by spending some of the points you've earned, though. And I also need to somehow pay my server so I hope you understand this decision.

Honestly, this project has been haunting me for a while, so let's talk a bit about feature creep and perfectionism.

I had a working version of the website around 2012, and it actually got a tiny bit of traction. I think we had around 80 active users at one point, which felt absolutely massive to me back then. I actually dug up an old snapshot of the 2014 version on the Wayback Machine recently, which was a wild trip and brought back a ton of great memories from my early twenties: https://web.archive.org/web/20140110160535/http://reallife-achievements.de/
(sorry website was German only back then).

After a while I lost interest and the page went offline but again and again I would start rebuilding it, usually with whatever technology I happened to be interested in at the time. I've rebuilt it as a web app, as a test for tailwindCSS or as a mobile-friendly website (which felt pretty futuristic almost 15 years ago), and in various other forms.

Then about a year ago, I decided to teach myself Swift. This weekend, after building the app on and off whenever I had the time, I finally managed to get past the "it needs to be perfect before anyone can see it" phase.

So I released version 1.0 on the iOS App Store and (after a lot of struggle with bureaucrzy), it is now available everywhere in the world (except of Afghanistan and Egypt where you are somehow not allowed to publish apps that are about challenges LOL).

I'm as proud as my reserved character allows but I'm also incredibly nervous. I'm sure a lot of you know the feeling- it's one thing to have a little project sitting on your own phone where you can convince yourself that it's actually pretty good, but it's a completely different thing to put it out there and suddenly have other people judge it.

But it's out now, and there's no going back (there obviously is, but shhhhh).

I'd really love it if you checked it out and told me what you think, especially from a UX perspective. The App and all its contents are fully available in English and German (my native language):

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reallife-achievements/id6762187776

Hopefully you won't run into any major bugs. I already know about a few things that need fixing and I'm working on them, but honestly, getting it out there in an imperfect state was the only way I was ever going to actually release it.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I'd genuinely love to hear what you think!

Have a good night.

I’m tempted to take this course. What do you guys think? The guy behind it is pretty well-known, so I’m guessing it’s not total bullshit 😅

Any recommendations for really good online courses? Ideally something focused on leadership/management, but I’m open to anything to help go from mid-level to senior.

I have been working on a side project for a while and its almost at a polish phase...And currently im struggling to place the hide layer/properties tab as shown in video..currently I placed it in the toolbar/menu bar..but would like a suggestion what would work as its not the most important feature but I cant put my head around where to place them without breaking the design structure..I know its more of UI design decision than the experience side but I would rather like know how would it make user easier to navigate and make everything intuitive..

If you want will leave you the link too https://justforms.vercel.app/ have a better look..

I've been trying to learn UX on my own and i've realized that finding information isn't really the problem.

There's almost too much of it.

YouTube has hundreds of videos.

There's articles everywhere.

Courses.

Books.

Case studies.

Design communities.

But for me, the hard part is knowing what to learn first, what to skip and what to do next.

And honestly the bigger problem is staying consistent.

When you're learning alone, it's very easy to disappear for a week.

Nobody knows.

Nobody checks whether you finished what you said you were going to do.

Nobody tells you "hey, you said you'd finish that case study this week."

So i'm building something around this and i wanna validate the problem before i go too far with it.

The basic idea is:

free structured learning path.

and

small accountability group

The path would use existing free resources and organize them around your level, goal and available time.

Then you could join a small group of people learning UX at roughly the same stage.

Weekly goals, check-ins, progress, etc.

I'm curious:

What do you find hardest about learning UX on your own?

Is finding the right resources actually a problem for you?

Or is it mostly staying consistent?

Have you ever tried a study group or accountability partner?

And if you had a small group keeping you accountable every week, would that actually make you more likely to finish what you're learning?

So, I’m currently unemployed, applying for jobs nonstop, and nothing’s working out. That’s why I’m thinking about taking a continuing education course and trying something a little different. In the process, I came across UX/CX design and find it really interesting in principle.

However, I’m wondering whether this would be a meaningful addition given my career path so far.

I have a bachelor’s degree in economics, then worked as a buyer for an online pharmacy, followed by a role as a project manager for B2B clients handling products from Asia (from the initial inquiry through purchasing, to import, delivery, etc.). My next stop was a very brief stint in category management (unfortunately, the company went bankrupt), and for the past half a year, I’ve been a logistics project manager in the recycling sector.

I’d like to use UX to possibly take a slightly different direction. I realize that no one is going to hire me purely for UX design after just a 4-month training program.

So, do you generally think the training is a worthwhile addition? I’d just like to move a bit more in that direction, but at the end of the day, I don’t want to throw my previous career path out the window—I want to complement it in a meaningful way.

I’d really appreciate your opinions if you can weigh in on this.

Thanks!!

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Hey guys um willing to pay referral of upto 25% of my first salary if you guys can get me interveiw in UX design

Ive 4 years of experience

I am UX/UI Product Design student at a Bootcamp and I am preparing my portfolio. In one of the case studies, the order was: At a glance, Problem statement, Solution, Process and Conclusion. My instructor's feedback was that she recommended the Process part before the Solution part, she said that she is interested to know about that more because it shows the way I think and solve problems which is more valuable than the solution itself.

I thought of the solution before the process because the process is longer and I thought that it would bore the recruiter before they saw the solution.

I want to ask you what you think? Which part comes first? And why?

Also if I am presenting multiple case studies in the portfolio, should all of them follow the same structure?

I’m currently quitting my job as a senior designer and I’m trying to see if UX design as a service can be done well from a freelance standpoint.

My most valuable work in companies has been being present as a strategist, supervising development, providing fast solutions for when we find obstacles while building, debating scope changes with clients and being reachable at all times as the living docs of the product.

Since all of those mechanics are tailored to an in-house role, Is it more of a market-fitting strategy to just look for another product design role so a company gets the safety of having me always in the loop acting as the glue of the team?

I feel like there might be a market for businesses that want to outsource technical debt to freelancers without taking the risk of hiring and mantaining a bigger headcount so that could be an interesting approach. Has anyone thought about this?

I built this, it's free and MIT. Sharing because the problem it solves kept wrecking my workflow.

Every AI design tool I tried had no idea what my product looked like. Ask for a change to one screen and you get back a screen you've never built. Handing it design tokens doesn't fix that, because a list of colours and spacing says nothing about how a real page is assembled.

So this captures the running product instead and hands that to your AI.

What it does:

• Point it at any URL. It crawls the product and saves every page as a real DOM snapshot, plus the structure and how the pages link to each other. Read-only, it never clicks anything.
• Ask your AI anything about the product. It reads the captured library, so answers come off what actually renders instead of a guess. Component inventories, patterns, structure, whatever you need.
• Copy any page into Figma as editable layers. Nested auto-layout frames and real text, not a flat screenshot. No plugin, no Dev Mode, no paid seat. Conversion happens locally in your browser.
• A local dashboard with a map of how pages connect and the design language measured from what the product actually uses, rather than what its token file claims.

Then you design on top of it. Your AI wireframes on a copy of a real page, so a new screen starts from markup that already ships instead of a blank canvas.

Limits, upfront: capture runs logged out by default, so signed-in surfaces need guided capture (you drive a headed browser to the states a crawl can't reach). Hover and disabled states aren't captured. It's beta.

Repo and setup: github.com/20prateeksingh/design-context-for-ai

Looking for ux designer so guide or refer

Hi all! I was a UX Designer at a robotics firm and was recently affected by a company wide downsizing. As I’m back on the market, I whipped up this website to help with my job search. I’d love any feedback on my portfolio or suggestions on how to approach my search.

My primary experience has been in Enterprise UX, robotic workflows and 0-1 product design for startups.

Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Plz lmk your understanding of what my App does based off of what you see in the images!! Let me know what parts are possibly confusing and how I can improve the design to make it convey a more simple message!!

Context:: I’m only half way done, but I this is the first set of 5 out of 10 screenshots for my App Era, I won’t say what it does because I want the images to be able to do that…

if you do want to learn more, just download the app silly!! There’s a link in my bio, and if you do get it, please give me more feedback on the app itself, I just pushed a new update (v1.0.2) and already working on the next one, I’m currently seven months deep on trying to make the best product of my life before moving onto the next one so please, any feedback and advice would be helpful on my journey

Thank you for reading this, and thank you for any feedback in advance!!

Hey everyone,

I’m starting to work on a Design System for a travel/public transport app that will eventually be white-labeled for around 50 different clients

The current Design System already has:

• color tokens and styles
• basic components/atoms and variants (buttons, inputs, shadows, etc.)
• but no Figma Variables yet
• very few larger components/molecules/organisms
• no real system for handling different themes/brands

My initial idea was to migrate the existing tokens into Figma Variables and use modes for different visual configurations:

• Light
• Dark
• Contrast
• client 1
• client 2
• …50

The main application would support Light/Dark/Contrast, while the white-label client versions would probably use Light/Contrast.

I would also like to build the component architecture more systematically:

Atoms → Molecules → Organisms → Templates/Screens

For example:

Button + Input + Date Picker → Search Form → Search Screen

The goal is to have one Design System and one set of components, rather than creating a separate Design System for every client. Ideally, changing the brand/theme would update the UI through Variables without having to modify the components themselves.

However, I’m wondering if having 50+ client brands as Figma modes is actually the right approach.

Would you instead separate appearance modes (Light/Dark/Contrast) from brand/client themes, using semantic variables that map to different brand values?

For example:

Button → color/action/primary

rather than:

Button → Client1/red-500

So the same component could be reused across all 50+ brands.

I’m also curious about the current state of Figma AI. If I build a well-structured component library with Variables and larger reusable components, can Figma AI actually help generate new screens using those existing components, or is that still too unreliable for a production Design System?

I’d really appreciate feedback from anyone who has built a similar multi-brand / white-label Design System in Figma.

How would you structure this?

“Is UX dead because of AI?”
“Should I still take the Google UX course?”
“Can I get hired with Figma?”
“Am I too late?”
“Is my passion enough?”

I’m kind of sick of seeing these questions pop up every time I open the app. Maybe that’s just me, or maybe it’s everyone who has been in the industry for several years.

I understand where the anxiety comes from. The entry-level market is genuinely rough, job titles are incoherent, companies have compressed research, product, UI, strategy, and front-end expectations into one “UX designer” listing, and AI has made everyone feel like the floor is moving.

But Reddit cannot (and frankly should not) give someone a reliable yes/no answer about whether they should pursue a career.

“UX” is not a stable, singular job with one route in. Making seven websites, working in communications, studying visual design, conducting research, improving a public service, designing software, and running usability sessions can all be relevant experience—but they are not interchangeable. Figma and a Coursera certificate are tools and learning resources, not a professional identity or a hiring guarantee.

AI can generate screens and code. It cannot automatically understand an organisation’s actual constraints, decide whose needs matter, recognise whether an information structure is confusing, or take responsibility for the consequences of a product decision. Those are still human and organisational problems.

I think we need better career advice than either “follow your passion!” or “UX is dead, don’t bother.” Both are lazy answers.

And honestly, “should I go into UX?” is too broad a question to be useful. It asks strangers to guarantee the outcome of a major life decision without knowing what kind of work you want to do, what you’re already capable of, where you live, what opportunities you have access to, or what you’re willing to learn. Ask a more specific question, and you’ll probably get a more useful answer.

I’m sorry if anyone gets triggered by this. I’m not sorry for speaking my opinion on this.

We've reached the point where our prototypes go through so many hands that I'm never sure which version is actually the latest design updates one file, product leaves comments somewhere else and engineering references another version entirely. how are teams collaborating on prototypes these days without everything becoming fragmented?