The hottest UX Substack posts right now

When making changes to website navigation, consider the impact on user experience and accessibility.
Menu design options include basic lists, simple drop downs, mega menus, and full-screen menus.
The complexity of a menu can affect conversion rates, with smaller menus potentially leading to a better CR.

Gatekeeping in the UX field can be harmful, especially when directed at newcomers.
Experienced professionals should mentor and support new designers, not intimidate them.
The UX industry should strive to be welcoming, collaborative, and free of jerks or gatekeepers.

Some AI coding tools have issues and low activity, like Mentat.
Aider offers a polished UX with autocomplete and git commits.
Sweep can be simple and useful for basic tasks, but struggles with more complex issues.

Task lists that remember everything become overwhelming and guilt-inducing, so trydeepwork automatically abandons tasks that get no attention for 90 days and notifies you first.
The only way to keep a task alive is to actually work on it — you can’t snooze or postpone it — which keeps your workspace focused on current, actionable work.
Long-term or “someday” ideas belong in other tools like Google Docs or Todoist; auto-abandon also serves as a clear signal to revive truly important items or let them go.

Many products end up with absurd, unusable features because no one on the team ever pays attention to real users or real-world use.
Make the customer’s needs omnipresent: short release cycles, engineers talking to customers, and seeing real usage expose design problems quickly and stop bad decisions spreading.
Create a culture where anyone can flag absurdity by encouraging psychological safety and cross-functional responsibility so problems get fixed instead of ignored.

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Apps as isolated containers are becoming unmanageable because AI makes building software cheap, so organizing your digital life around thousands of separate apps won’t scale.
The app model arose from economic moats like hard distribution and costly infrastructure, and those moats are eroding as infrastructure is commoditised and AI lowers development costs.
The future is fluid computation over shared data, where AI lets you manipulate any data across tools and interfaces without being locked into individual apps.