Practical insights for better UX • Running “Measure UX” and “Design Patterns For AI” • Founder of SmashingMag • Speaker • Loves writing, checklists and running workshops on UX. 🍣
Berlin, Berlin, Deutschland
224.398 Follower:innen
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224.398 Follower:innen
500+ Kontakte
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As a UX Lead, I’ve been working with mid-size and large organizations for 20+ years, helping improve UX of complex systems and intricate design challenges — but also measure UX and design impact and design effective AI experience. Among many others, I’ve been working with the European Parliament, OTTO, Zalando, Marc O'Polo, Axel Springer SE, REWE Digital, Alliander and others.
I’m also founder and editor-in-chief of SmashingMag since 2006, an online magazine for designers and developers, where he helps curate friendly, inclusive front-end and UX conferences (SmashingConf).
I love dealing with complexity, fixing broken processes and work with difficult stakeholders. I also love writing, speaking, solving UX challenges, running workshops, and sharing what I’ve learned — and refining little details that matter to make sure people actually use, value and perhaps even fall in love with our digital products.
🍎 Email: vitaly@smashingconf.com
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Vitaly Friedman hat dies geteilt🍋 A Practical Guide For Design Managers, with useful resources to get started, bitter lessons, things to keep in mind and do’s and don’ts ↓ 🚫 Most managers don’t give enough feedback. 🚫 Don’t “sandwich” feedback — critique with humility. 🚫 Never do your team’s work; help them do their best work. 🚫 Don’t mandate decisions from the top; explain them. 🚫 Don’t be a silent voice in the back: be present at all times. 🚫 Don’t be scared to hire people who outperform you. ✅ Good managers are vulnerable and sincere. ✅ Your best work gets done in well-prepared 1:1’s. ✅ Track progress and achievements for each team member. ✅ Fight hard for your team’s promotions and bonuses. ✅ Start your week by asking your team how you can help. ✅ Give feedback often, timely and firmly. ✅ Set expectations and explain what success means. ✅ Always set a structure around what needs to happen next. ✅ Protect your team when something goes wrong. ✅ Give your team the credit when things go right. For remote teams, there is rarely no such thing as over-communication. Surely nobody really wants more meetings in their calendars. and some team rituals might appear like a waste of time — but often they are much needed, and can replace never-ending Slack threads and discussions. Jumping on a call to discuss is a simple way to address them. Also, I’d like to emphasize that becoming a manager isn’t really a promotion. It’s not necessarily a “common” career path either. It's a different path, and an entirely new role — with new responsibilities and tasks. The most remarkable part about management is that you can plant a seed and see people growing to incredible heights. But sometimes you will face confrontation, conflicts, strong opinions and lack of team spirit. This will make you feel exhausted, discouraged and lonely. So don’t forget to build relationships with people who go through the same things like you do. Build a guild. Meet regularly. Share what has worked for you. Carve out time to think. To reflect. To build bridges and discover connections. If it’s for you, it will feel right. And if it isn’t, there is always a way back. ✤ Useful resources 20 Lessons For New Design Managers, by 🪴Tarryn Lambert https://lnkd.in/eS-_sByG So, You’re Managing a Design Team, by Alex Mandel https://lnkd.in/eg3GCxCD From Design Lead to Manager, by Jared Zimmerman https://lnkd.in/esR6t5ay Bitter Lessons as a Design Manager, by Slava Shestopalov https://lnkd.in/eJuRJ-PE How To Become A Better Design Manager, by Romina Kavcic https://lnkd.in/e45p4jNk How To Grow As A Design Manager (Playbook) https://lnkd.in/eaXEiKK2 The Manager’s Handbook (free book), by Alex MacCaw https://lnkd.in/gXJ_-Rc2 ↓
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Vitaly Friedman hat dies geteilt☄️ The Atlas of AI Interaction Design (https://ai-interaction.com), a free, open source reference, with guidelines, examples, patterns, data types, constraints and touch points — to help teams align on how AI features and AI systems are designed, communicated and built. Beautifully put together by Brandon Harwood. I love Brandon’s (very!) comprehensive overview of AI capabilities broken down across inbound (sensing and structuring), internal (reasoning and deciding), outbound (expressing and creating) and interactive (acting and learning) layers, with useful examples of each. It reminds me of the AI Brainstorming Kit, put together and kindly shared by HCII of the Carnegie Mellon University, with plenty of use cases and capabilities that we often don’t consider in enough details as we are looking at a shiny text box for manual prompting: https://lnkd.in/d8Wjm4Vw. Highly recommended. – 💎 Design Patterns For AI Interfaces Agentic UX Patterns, by Dustin Kirk https://lnkd.in/d3WKrZnW AI Interaction Design Patterns, by Emily Campbell https://www.shapeof.ai Design Patterns For Building Trust, by If https://lnkd.in/etZ7mm2Y Voice of AI, by Anne Cantera https://www.voiceofai.io AI Audio Guidelines, by Harsheen Vohra https://lnkd.in/dQFcg3Vu AIverse Design Patterns for AI, by Kshitij Agrawal, Dave Brown, Clair Sun https://lnkd.in/dBj86jHx AI UX Patterns, by Luke Bennis https://lnkd.in/dF9AZeKZ AI Design Patterns Catalogue, by Maggie Appleton https://lnkd.in/ebAp9Sb8 Where should AI sit in your UI?, by Sharang Sharma https://lnkd.in/dyyMKuU9 Prompt UX Patterns, by Sharang Sharma https://lnkd.in/dWE8Ypbr — 💎 Video courses: Design Patterns For AI 2026, by yours truly Vitaly Friedman Video course: https://smashed.by/ai-ux Maven: https://lnkd.in/di4qURzF AI and Design System, by Brad Frost, TJ Pitre, Ian Frost https://lnkd.in/dY-_4JEu Agentic Design Systems (upcoming!), by Romina Kavcic Guide: https://www.aidesign.guide AI Design Systems Conference, by Sil Bormüller + team https://lnkd.in/e4WfFEvF — Glad to see more and more resources emerging around design patterns for AI — with a lot of experiments and interaction patterns going way beyond a text box. #ux #design #AI
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Vitaly Friedman hat dies geteilt📣 Running today: Free Lightning Session on “How To Design For Trust and Confidence In AI” (https://lnkd.in/d72b66Qa). No strings attached — feel free to join in, and invite friends as well! 📅 Apr 2, 2026 (around 1h 30mins) 🗃️ Includes slides and resources 🎟️ Save your free spot → https://lnkd.in/d72b66Qa 🚀 Next AI training (May 26): https://lnkd.in/di4qURzF --- ✤ In the workshop, we’ll cover: 🌈 How to Calibrate Trust in AI Trust calibration spectrum, how to find the balance between aversion and overreliance, why AI products shouldn't aim for maximum trust. 🗂️ How to Handle AI Hallucinations and Poor Context We can't fully prevent them, but we can set up proper guardrails, human-in-the loop, user's control, verification. 🍱 UX Challenges With Confidence Scores Useful design patterns such sandboxing, intent confirmation, consensus meter, context engineering. 🚦 Verified Context Layers Context compounding, retrieval correctness ≠ factual correctness, how to treat context and keep it clean. 🎟️ Free for everyone: https://lnkd.in/d72b66Qa --- Looking forward to seeing you live, everyone! Please share with your friends and colleagues — and thank you so much for your kind interest, trust and ongoing support throughout all these years! 🙏🏾 ♻️
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Vitaly Friedman hat dies geteilt📈 How To Deal With Statistical Significance In UX (https://lnkd.in/dTzksfBM), a helpful reminder that statistical significance may not matter as much as practical significance, and useful insights often emerge in small-sample studies with just enough practical significance. Written by Rachel Banawa, PhD. ✅ STATISTICAL significance → result is unlikely to occur by chance. ✅ It means: probability value (p-value) < preset threshold (0.05). ✅ It gives us reliability: same test likely to return same outcomes. 🤔 It doesn’t say how large or impactful it is for users/businesses. ✅ Reliability ≠ Impact → It doesn’t mean it’s worth acting upon. ✅ PRACTICAL significance → good enough to matter in real life. ✅ It means: Effect Size is big enough to have an impact. 🤔 Large sample sizes make small differences look “significant”. 🤔 Small sample sizes are more vulnerable to noise and outliers. 🤔 As a result, they can hide or skew meaningful patterns. I love Rachel's point that statistical significance doesn’t tell us if a difference is noticeable to users, meaningful for experiences, or influential for a business. We need to understand is a difference is meaningful enough that it would affect users and businesses in the real world. Teams often obsess about discovering ultimate truths by arguing about statistical significance between events — but in reality, it may not matter if it won’t have a noticeable impact. Instead, we need to uncover user needs and find leverage to dial up success moments and reduce pain points. There are 2 key questions we ask to evaluate practical significance: ⌾ 1. User Perception: Would real users actually notice this change? We are exploring if a particular change will meaningfully impact user’s experience, e.g. in terms of perception of speed, reducing frustrations or hesitations, minimizing confusion, or changing behavior. It's also where we look at frequency and severity of a problem a change addresses. ⌾ 2. Business Value: Does this difference matter to the organization? Does a result affect important business outcomes, e.g. saving expenses, reducing cost acquisition costs, increasing efficiency, reducing errors or failures. We also explore its impact on business KPIs and design KPIs. --- Small improvements can compound in high-volume contexts, while larger improvements may be irrelevant if they don’t support strategic goals. In practice, even if we have low statistical significance but high qualitative evidence (“practical significance”), we can initiate experiments, roll them out to a small percentage of users (5%) and iterate from there. And: as Nikki Anderson pointed out, statistical significance was never designed for qualitative research. It ensures that our findings aren’t random. The real question is how many users we can dismiss as "irrelevant" or "not representative" until we realize that there is a problem that's worth solving. Continues in comments ↓
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Vitaly Friedman hat dies geteilt🚀 Should Links Open In New Tabs? (https://lnkd.in/dAXfQkTT), UX guidelines on how to open internal and external links without breaking user’s flow and causing frustration ↓ --- ♦️ 1. Frequent Challenges With Browser Tabs It's reasonable to assume that the question is a bit dated. People always find a way out. In practice, people often struggle with their browser tabs, for a few reasons: – Users have too many tabs, and navigating between them is hard – Users switch between browser windows, with tabs open in each – Users often get lost and confused between all their browser tabs – Some users don’t realize that they've landed in a new tab – Users can’t easily go back when links open in new tabs. – New tabs are especially frustrating for mobile users. – Abrupt interruptions cause errors, delays and start-overs. In short, navigating between numerous open tabs is difficult — and often there are many duplicates, things to read, unfinished processes and unsent Gmail messages. In this context, having a reliable, predictable navigation that gives users a sense of control is very welcome and desired. --- 🔹 2. Should Links Be Underlined? No, links don't have to be underlined, but often it's a good idea to do so to avoid confusion. One of the WCAG requirements is not to rely on color only when you want to distinguish a button or link from the rest of the text. Styling links in blue or another color doesn’t suffice since it still might not be visible for people with color blindness. The most common method is to underline links; they can also appear in bold, or have a background highlighting. --- 🔶 3. Do Icon Links Need Labels? Yes! One of the main benefits of icons is that they help us save space in our digital interfaces. Yet it often comes at the cost of confusion, zig-zaging and dancing around product sections — especially if the meaning is revealed on hover, or in a tooltip. In practice only few icons are universally understood (e.g. 🏠 🔍 ✏️ 🗑️ 📅). Most icons are ambiguous, overloaded and have to be decoded in context. Always include labels for icon links — or allow people to expand and collapse the sidebar navigation to make space for further levels of navigation. Also, people often remember not the icon, and not the label, but the position where it's located in the interface. So don’t move icons around based on the frequency of use. If text labels don’t fit in the menu, maybe they could fit in better where they are used — next to a data table, charts or a dashboard — displayed as chips or action buttons instead. Full article: https://lnkd.in/dAXfQkTT --- 🌻 My friendly UX courses (15% off with 🎟 LINKEDIN): Smart Design Patterns → https://smashed.by/smart Design Patterns For AI → https://smashed.by/ai-ux Measure UX & Design Impact → https://measure-ux.com Happy designing — and thanks for reading! 🎉🥳 #ux #design
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Vitaly Friedman hat dies geteilt🧘🏽♀️ UX Challenges and Product Design Exercises. With design exercises and whiteboard challenges for everything from onboarding and journey mapping to competitive analysis and user flows — to get ready for the next UX interview ↓ And of course you could ask AI to complete all of these challenges in no time. But the point of these exercises is not to ship faster, but to develop a point of view, a perspective, an opinion, a taste. Sketch solutions on paper, in low-fidelity, just to illustrate an idea, a concept, and a user flow. I've found it to be so valuable to just sit with a challenge for a while. To take time to think through, before heading for AI to generate any ideas or concepts. That’s what sharpens critical point of view and so much needed design skills that tell apart the good from the generic, a strategy from tactical fluff — and helps you perform better in job interviews. ✺ Useful Bookmarks UX Challenges and Design Exercises, by Jordan Bowman, Taylor Palmer https://lnkd.in/eb7jkaGc Monowi Product Design Exercises (Notion), via Stéphanie Walter https://lnkd.in/emKfQ3zF Design System Tactics and Strategies, by Ness Grixti https://lnkd.in/dxV49R2U WeWork Product Design Exercises, by Artiom Dashinsky https://lnkd.in/eTYKCcBk UX Design Challenges From Real World, by Uxcel https://lnkd.in/eH_Yrugg Design Practice Challenges, by Zac Halbert, Jake Fleming https://designercize.com/ --- ✤ How To Work Through UX Challenges How To Perform Best In Whiteboard Design Challenges, by Zhenshuo Fang https://lnkd.in/e2keCUMq How to Tackle a Design Interview Challenge, by Chrysan Tung https://lnkd.in/ema9aaXG Working Through Product Design Exercises in Job Interviews, by Tanner Christensen https://lnkd.in/eey2G3RX Weekly Product Design Challenges (newsletter), by Artiom Dashinsky https://lnkd.in/esvTa-MX UX Design Workbooks and Exercises, by Krisztina Szerovay https://lnkd.in/eKcfsftf --- ✤ Useful Books ⌾ Solving Product Design Exercises, by Artiom Dashinsky ⌾ The Creativity Challenge, by Tanner Christensen ⌾ Designing Products People Love, by Scott Hurff ⌾ A Practical Guide to Design System, by Ness Grixti And: don’t get discouraged if you don’t tick all the boxes in a promising job opening. Apply. Show the incredible expertise you bring to the table. The truth is that many companies don’t know the expertise that they need until they found a person who actually has it. You've got this — and good luck! ✊🏽 #ux #design
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Vitaly Friedman hat dies geteilt💳 Visa Product Design System (https://design.visa.com), an incredible reference for an enterprise design system focused on accessibility, inclusive design, data visualization and forms — along with plenty of examples and usage guidelines. Wonderful work by the Visa design team. What I absolutely love here is an *incredible* amount of attention dedicated to accessibility guidelines — for web, mobile and PDFs, best practices, keyboard controls. Each component comes with a dedicated accessibility section, previews and implementation details. It’s rare to see that level of detail in action. Helpful guidelines: Accessibility requirements: https://lnkd.in/ddjVar6e 👍 Chatbot: https://lnkd.in/ewVjfr86 👍 Charts: https://lnkd.in/eVde8gJN Data Visualization: https://lnkd.in/epK4XQD6 File upload: https://lnkd.in/et-TKUwf Inclusive language: https://lnkd.in/e37G7X-3 Information architecture: https://lnkd.in/eF-abpSQ One-time-passcode: https://lnkd.in/eBcSfT_A PDFs: https://lnkd.in/d3A8gWeR 👍 Search: https://lnkd.in/exgzbG8q Wizard: https://lnkd.in/eD8TPYDy --- ✤ Enterprise Design Systems (+ Figma kits) Aarhus University: https://delphinus.au.dk/ 👍 AXA: https://lnkd.in/efpasXYe DHL: https://lnkd.in/eWUH8auh 👍 DyDx: https://lnkd.in/eUBScaHp 👍 eBay: https://playbook.ebay.com Ethr: https://lnkd.in/ehXufMvs 👍 GE Healthcare: https://lnkd.in/e9n2sP4Y 👍 Goldman Sachs: https://www.figma.com/@gs 👍 Gusto: https://lnkd.in/eUK_rpQv 👍 JSTOR: https://pharos.jstor.org/ 👍 MetLife: https://lnkd.in/ezJMWRHN 👍 Nordhealth: https://nordhealth.design 👍 NRK: https://lnkd.in/e3NV86Kc 👍 OpenBridge: https://lnkd.in/ehdChWtN Queensland Health: https://lnkd.in/eC4FCkMi 👍 Salesforce: https://lnkd.in/eDjT23wi Semrush: https://lnkd.in/dUgWtwnu SRP Medical: https://lnkd.in/eTpTMamt Vanderbilt University: https://lnkd.in/eACuTg_a 👍 Workday: https://lnkd.in/eYwJ9eD4 And a HUGE word of support to everyone working on complex enterprise products. Typically this work comes not just with the challenges in business requirements and design decisions, but also layers of internal politics, slow and rigid processes, strict compliance and legal regulations and NDAs. 👏🏼👏🏽👏🏾 It’s the UX work that often goes unnoticed, yet has tremendous impact in critical domains, from healthcare and higher education to employee’s internal systems. These are products that people often can’t choose, and have to rely on day in and day out to get their work done. So thank you for sharing your work and writing about Enterprise UX — one of the many challenging topics that is very much needed, but is very hard to find. #ux #DesignSystems
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Vitaly Friedman hat dies geteilt🚀 A few months ago, I’ve FINALLY launched “Design Patterns For AI 2026” (https://smashed.by/ai-ux), my new practical guide for designers on designing meaningful AI experiences — that people understand, use and can rely on — with design patterns and 100s of real-life examples. 🍰 30 chapters, with new videos added yearly 🍎 Free preview, examples, UX workflows 🍧 Add-on: live UX training, running 2× a year 🍿 No subscription: get once, access forever 🎟️ Use the code AI to get 20% off today 🚀 Jump to details → https://smashed.by/ai-ux --- In many companies, AI features are often launched just because of AI. But very often AI experiences are slow, verbose, misleading, unreliable. They are used once just to be abandoned for good — with high costs and little use. For the last 2 years, I was trying to find ways to make AI experiences more meaningful and more useful. More accessible and more sustainable. Shape AI experiences that go way beyond a magical text box — and guide users to better prompts and results without typing. As it turned out, the challenges are often the same: 🚫 Hallucinations erode trust in a split of a second. Trust is hard to build, but easy to lose. AI often imagines things, assumes things, forgets things, changes its mind, amplifies stereotypes and says what we want to hear. The best way to reduce hallucinations is to clean data, extend context and heavily scope output. Poor input → poor output. 🚫 People don’t really care about AI. AI is rarely value proposition that people appreciate and understand. People compare features that they need, and how useful they are for them. Good AI products set strict boundaries for AI and build it on top of reliable software to get the best of both worlds — with a human in the loop. 🚫 Prompting is slow and hard to get right. People struggle in articulating their needs. We spend so much time in writing, editing and tweaking prompts — often missing key details and asking leading questions. We need to slow down prompting, add controls to extend prompts and suggest missing context with UI controls and pre-prompts. 🚫 AI-second products perform better than AI-first products. “AI-first” focuses on technology, often leaving humans out of equation. But most successful products are reliable products. They start with user needs, then focus on designing the user journey associated with user goals. It’s about the what, not how. AI is a path to the goal, not the goal itself. Jump to details → https://smashed.by/ai-ux --- I‘m addressing some of these painful challenges in the course. And I sincerely hope that you‘ll find it useful. I’ve tried my best to keep the pricing affordable. But if it’s still expensive, send me a message and I’ll do my best to make it work. 👏🏽 ♻️ Please share with your friends and colleagues if possible. And thank you so much for your incredibly kind and warm support, everyone! 🙏 🙏🏼 🙏🏿 #ux #design
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Vitaly Friedman hat dies geteilt💾 How To Improve UX In Legacy Systems (https://lnkd.in/e7q3dxxa). Guidelines to make UX impact in legacy-ridden companies with broken systems ↓ 🤔 In enterprises, 40–60% of time is spent managing legacy. ✅ It’s outdated systems that are critical for daily operations. ✅ Mostly zombies: still work, but nobody knows how and why. ✅ They always come with a broken, decade-old ecosystem. ✅ Slow, fragile, heavily customized and poorly documented. ✅ High cost of replacement: retraining, fine-tuning, hardware. 🤔 Users are heavily attached to legacy despite its drawbacks. 🚫 Don’t dismiss legacy entirely: build on existing knowledge. ✅ Start by thinking how the system has been used before. ✅ Set up a matrix of existing workflows and dependencies. ✅ Build relationships with key stakeholders and legacy users. 🚫 You can’t build in 10 months what was fine-tuned for 10 years. ✅ Strategy 1: Big-bang relaunch (risky, expensive, takes years). ✅ Strategy 2: Slowly replace/retire pieces of legacy (fragile). ✅ Strategy 3: Public beta release in parallel (cost of 2 systems). ✅ Strategy 4: Legacy UI upgrade + public beta (quick wins). ✅ Include legacy users early: for feedback, ownership, buy-in. ✅ Reserve a design capacity to maintain legacy until launch. With legacy projects, failure is not an option. You always migrate not just components and features, but also users and workflows. You operate on the very heart of the business. So expect a lot of attention, skepticism, doubts, fears and concerns. Stakeholders will request old and new features. They will focus on edge cases and exceptions. They will question your decisions. They will send mixed signals and change their opinions. And: they will expect the new system to run flawlessly from day one. The best thing you can do is to bring them in early. Work with them throughout the entire design process. Run a successful pilot project to build trust. Report your progress repeatedly. And account for intense phases of rigorous testing with legacy users. Revamping a legacy system is a tough challenge. But there is rarely any project that can have so much impact at such scale. Roll up your sleeves and get through it successfully, and your team will be remembered, respected and rewarded for years to come. Useful resources: UX Migration Strategy For Legacy Apps, by Tamara Chehayeb Makarem https://lnkd.in/eAMsbaHt How To Improve Legacy Systems, by Christopher Wong https://lnkd.in/eXENd-6E Designing With Legacy, by Peter Zalman https://lnkd.in/ewe-QGQE Redesigning A Large Legacy System, by Pawel Halicki https://lnkd.in/eVBN7xPJ [more in comments ↓]
Vitaly Friedman hat einen Beitrag kommentiert
8 Std.
Ahwww, thanks Emanuela Damiani — would love to catch up with you soon! :)
Vitaly Friedman hat auf einen Kommentar geantwortet
12 Std.
Odette Jansen Thanl you so much, Odette! I hope you‘ll find it helpful!
Vitaly Friedman hat auf einen Kommentar geantwortet
2 Tage
Great question, Deneb Pulsipher, CPWA! Personally, I would *always* argue for link underlines, and I think they are they most recognizable, obvious and helpful way to distinguish links from regular text. However, the WCAG guidelines don't explicitly require underlines, so bold is a way out. But personally, I would alway favor underlines — exactly for the reason that you mention!
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Vitaly Friedman hat darauf reagiertVitaly Friedman hat darauf reagiertWhen an LLM is tone-deaf with a frustrated user, that's not a model problem. It's a design problem. How the model speaks, when it defers, and how it handles pressure are all interaction design decisions. It seems many designers working on LLM-enabled features are making these decisions by feel, changing the prompt until something looks approximately right. I've been using a structured loop in early prototyping that treats the system prompt and evals as design material: craft it, test it against consistent scenarios, score the outputs, and version every change. Also, pulling insight from usability sessions in as valuable new test cases for model behaviour. Real users phrase things in ways you'd never generate synthetically. I wrote the whole method up here: https://lnkd.in/e6X_d-_H OIAI
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Smashing Media AG
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Smashing Magazine
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Freelance Web Designer
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How To Measure UX and Design Impact
A new practical guide for designers and managers on how to set up and track design success in your company — with UX scorecards, UX metrics, the entire workflow and Design KPI trees. https://measure-ux.com
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🍣 Smart Interface Design Patterns
Projekt anzeigenA video course and live UX training on interface design, UX and design patterns (9h). With 100s of real-life examples and best practices, from mega-dropdowns to complex enterprise tables.
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