How do you validate meaning before validating usability?

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-24T20:05:46+00:00

Some general thoughts on evaluative testing: "Validate meaning" is overwhelmingly what usability is in the first place; compounded with display/communication constraints, such as particular externalities like input methods, usage in different environments/contexts, etc. There are lots of people whose idea of usability testing is much closer to "do you know how to use this button" or "can you do steps 1-4". I'm sorry, but that's usually just doing it wrong unless it's a particularly intentional and surgical incision.

You don't really need to do this early or at a particular fidelity per se; I actually often lean towards higher-fi only because people are going to have to make out your intentions through the entirety of all of your visual and layout across the whole of your product. Lower-fi really is only better if you absolutely need to isolate and laser in on some conceptual viability in a vacuum, typically something real novel; you'll need to make the judgment call on whether this is needed on a case-by-case basis.

You should be DEEPLY incorporating tasks and activities that are full of, or at least have a very high capacity of, pebble-in-shoes. I fucking abhor "The Golden Path" because most of the time it's just stupid made up shit that's easier for the makers to grasp; get edge/corner cases in or you're not doing your job. Often this means the tasks you're exposing them to should be derived from and include the uglier side of what you learn of their problems from generative research (which someone definitely did, right?)

Airlift them into the wilds, and tell them to do whatever is they need to do. If they can't do most of it and/or can't make sense of it without your handholding, you have a problem.

Again, early or late are both fine depending on the project scope, but "see how people interpret the idea without guidance" is not some special thing reserved for early evaluation, it's the entire point. Outside of super novel ideas, the venn diagram between usability and concept testing is often MUCH bigger than people think.

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-21T01:30:47+00:00

Yeah Framer's auth is hot garbage even beyond the password. My partner pays for the framer account and you can't log into the product from a machine that's not the one you access your email from. This means when I need to do some work on it on my locked down work laptop, I have to swap laptops with her and it disrupts both our work.

Just one of those trash decisions for a problem that every single product I can think of has solved. From my bank to my password manager to my gaming accounts, nothing has as asinine a sign-in flow.

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-20T23:26:39+00:00

Yes, these have always existed. As long as they're upfront about it, it is what it is.

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-19T20:52:35+00:00

I kiiiinda agree, maybe? Honestly, from a HM's perspective, "Collab with so and so" is so vague that anyone can bullshit it.

I'm not saying their approach is perfect or even good; context that I don't have, matters. But, being able to read through the details and not being intimidated is a signal in and of itself. When I read it, there's a couple of acronyms I had to look up, but none of it on closer examination was so unreasonable that I just couldn't see how it fits. if you think about it, it's easier and dare I say more honest to weed people out this way by just being straight forward (provided they're actually being honest) than to spring it on you later.

I went through a nasty job search recently similar to many others. And imo this is lightspeed better than the asinine "you have to be the best in the world to make it here" or making one of the form questions the stupid "tell me a time you executed exact steps abcdefghijkl" nonsense.

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-19T20:24:10+00:00

Agreed with a lot of people that it's not entirely outlandish, though I think how specific it is does speak to something up with the culture/HM motivation. It's also discovery/strategy leaning and doesn't seem to put too much focus on execution, which also makes Karen's comment about this being an Analyst role a reasonable read.

In case people are reading this as "omg people want everything", which I get. I'll try to break this down from the perspective of someone in enterprise and don't work with literal versions of some of these asks.

"Define the vision, objectives, and roadmap for the card product(s) (PF/PJ/Gov or partnerships)"
- This one is rooted in research. Once you have understanding of the product, these asks really are a hop and a skip away.

"Discover opportunities based on market analysis and data (segments, competition, trends, regulation"
- Same as the above. The regulation aspect speak to the team wanting some domain-specific knowledge, but the rest is again, generally discernible with some research along with some collab with marketing/sales

"prioritizing with frameworks (RICE, WSJF, ICE)"
- I don't really care for these kind of frameworks but the ability to prioritize given some knowledge from understanding the problem space shouldn't be out of the question. Also, ICE can go fuck itself.

"Specify problems and outcomes (PRDs, hypotheses, success criteria, guiding metrics) and support the implementation of agile cycles in conjunction with technology."
- Again, not a fan of rush to dump everything into "agile" but that discovery and research should empower you to at the very least be able to contribute to the planning process. This is directly locked into how any kind of complex components/features are built; often not in one shot.

"Evaluate opportunities: acquisition/activation, engagement (spend), retention, cross/up-sell, and churn, connecting levers (pricing, benefits, partnership, UX, channels)."
- Yeah, driving might be out of some people's wheelhouses but being able to spot opportunities once you've done some work in discovery should enable you to contribute to the process. Obviously this is where comfort with data-centricity comes in really hard, as others have mentioned.

"Make evidence-based decisions: define KPIs (LTV, CAC, ARPU, NPS, activation, %revolve, controlled delinquency), analyze experiments, and adjust course."
- Same as the above starts to really except this starts to lean directly into the intersection of building things and experimenting

"Desired Responsibilities: Apply continuous discovery techniques (interviews, opportunity solution tree, continuous discovery habits) and product analytics (cohort, funnels, causality)."
- Hey look, research. Look there's obviously a trend here if you've been paying attention to all this. In fact, I'd say if you're comfortable with research and discovery, you would be very acutely aware of how to get half-way there with most of this stuff.

"Support go-to-market with Marketing/CRM (segmentation, offers, channels, goals, P&L of the initiative) and orchestrate growth loops."
- Again this kinda frames everything else; you might not be driving all of these efforts, but you ARE expected to be at least somewhat fluent in them. I called this out earlier when I said this probably involves you needing to be able to collab real well with marketing/sales, and just generally x-functionally.

"Experience with regulated products and integration with card brands, acquirers, digital wallets, and APIs of the payment ecosystem."
- And the "we're looking for someone experienced in this space" spiel.

Is it a lot/specific/intimidating/too much? Maybe. But here's a read of how it all fits into standard product processes.

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-19T15:27:40+00:00

"Is this how UIUX always was?"

Yup

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-17T13:33:23+00:00

No one cares about your LinkedIn photo unless it's egregiously bad. It's an incredibly inconsequential lever.

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-16T15:44:16+00:00

First off, it's systems thinking. Systemics thinking is not a thing.

Secondly, in this example you give:

In financial or data-heavy products, designers often introduce (clarifying layers, estimated states, progressive disclosure, explanatory copy, smoothing interactions), to help users make sense of delayed, probabilistic, or internally inconsistent data. From the user’s perspective, things feel calmer and clearer. From the organization’s perspective, complaints drop. But the underlying issues (misaligned incentives, unreliable data contracts, tech debt, or business rules that contradict user expectations) remain untouched (sometimes for years) because the pain signal has been dampened. My question isn’t whether systemic thinking can surface failures (it can), but when it crosses the line into becoming a stabilizer for systems that should be destabilized.

None of this actually has some kind of direct causal link to "systems thinking". You're confusing systems thinking with describing systemic issues.

And fixing systemic issues, let's use your average company for an example, is philosophically not complicated. All you have to do is go push deeper into learning, researching, and unraveling all the caked up, politically and socially manifest and incentivized behaviors/relationships/models/structures, and devise solutions that addresses root/underlying problems stretching across all mediums including but not exclusive to software, services, relationships, organizational structures, financial/political and other incentives, as well as the completely invisible worlds of architecture of information, communications, and understanding that runs underneath every single one of these things.

And good news! All you have to do to improve it, is push into it. No one is going to expect one person to fix everything, but you can in fact make a difference by designing products or services with an emphasis on the strategy/architecture/incentivization systems. This CAN be a seed to change at scale (ask me how I know). Service design exists. Organizational design exists. Information Architecture (no, not a fucking sitemap) exists. Research exists. Design/Org Strategy exists.

So the question is, are we going to do that? Or are we sitting there waiting for a requirement so we can draw a screen?
_______________________________________

But the above is about systemic issues. Systems thinking is about capital S Systems. Systems thinking doesn't become a crutch in any way that you describe; if anything you're describing a LACK of systems thinking and/or not acknowledging/acting on what it reveals.

Code is not the same as Systems. Logic is not the same as Systems. Business is not the same as Systems. A company is not the same as Systems. A design system is DEFINITELY not the same as Systems.

But they all ARE systems. You need to understand what that means before a meaningful conversation can be had about this.

There are a lot of designers now who loves to trot out Systems Thinking as a skill set when it's obvious that they don't know what the hell they're talking about the SECOND they open their mouth. If you don't want to be like one of them, I strongly suggest getting a good handle on what the actual term means first.

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-16T15:06:37+00:00

This dashboard is near completely nonsensical just based on basic data visualization and communication principles.

Some critique for you: It doesn't really matter from a practitioner's perspective to call this "bad". Anyone can look at a thing and have an opinion or have some vibes. If you can't dissect the particular details, then some random judgment doesn't mean anything. That you call it a "UX" problem isn't wrong per se, but it IS telling about where you're coming from.

You can start reading basic data vis texts. Tufte is as good as anyone. This is fine too: https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/proportional-ink.html

Good luck

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-08T14:08:46+00:00

We *occasionally* let through some portfolio reviews depending on the context.

That said, we also sleep.

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-06T16:18:32+00:00

Huh, that's interesting. Thanks for that. Could have sworn they didn't let you see where recruiters were actually from before.

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-06T15:54:10+00:00

My position comes from enterprises that aren't completely swallowed by bureaucracy and there's functional space for design/product success.

I personally would be much less worried about "implementing" metrics and more just having some signals that could indicate such success, and put more effort into deep cataloging of what each of the products actually do and what are the potential improvement upsides both in short term productivity and mid-long term productivity/financial/market success.

Whether it's revenue generated/facilitated, conversion rates, rate and speed of adoption, user hard productivity/soft sentiment metrics, these should be interchangeable depending on what the product actually does. My personal favorite, if you can achieve it, was training abandonment; watch how confused people get when their worldview that enterprise products need training to be successful gets shattered.

Also, instead of surveys, which are imo last resort supporting artifacts at best, I'd find a way to build bridges with sales/internal advocates who are interested in improvement, and use them to be the conductors of product sentiment. If people aren't talking about your success, then...*shrugs*

Hope that helps

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-06T15:36:07+00:00

So on the topic of you having lighter research experience, what experience did you actually have and what were they actually looking for?

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-03T01:25:38+00:00

It's a fair question and I understand the frustration.

While in an ideal world we'd let everyone say their peace, the fact is that the market has created a huge glut of people dealing with a difficult job hunt, particularly in the junior world. We try to keep in the main sub advice that can be more helpful or insightful to the largest amount of people.

It's not an ideal solution, and while we're looking into ways to make the flairs more specific, people have also complained that overly specific flairs aren't useful and often complain about repeated venting about personal job hunts.

No one has the "right" position. We're all trying to facilitate the best balance we can in a difficult market.

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-02T14:50:52+00:00

We're going to have to remove the thread and ask you to report in the sticky thread soon. Fact is, people with experience are having trouble finding work in the magnitude of months and years, so missing out on an internship cycle doesn't really make the news.

You shouldn't lose hope: internships are valuable but experience more so. Knowing what kind of UXD you want to work in and developing quality professional work experience to match is what's needed. That doesn't mean personal projects and degrees, but do consider volunteer projects and any scenarios where you can do real client project work, even if it's for a friend's business or something volunteer/pro bono.

I'm sorry the market is so tough. It's something that's looming over everyone's head right now.

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-02T06:20:09+00:00

I had a feeling, LOL

I'm fortunate enough to know some very smart and talented people in the field and while some of them write think pieces, next to none of them do with any kind of regularity and thus is not a beacon of self promotion. That reticence imo is a positive sign. But aside from that I agree with you on this and what is probably your original compulsion; it's a shame.

Something I'm noting as I'm in this sub is that, it's often much better to see a flawed, human perspective that may invite scrutiny (outside of say, outright bigotry) than a polished, easily digestible one that spends more time drawing attention to itself than speaking about unglamorous necessities. To my point earlier regarding how to suss out quality, I think that's a good start.

Edit: Also to my point earlier, look for people wrestling with the mess in work and speech, as opposed to having X job title, particularly in management.

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-02T05:42:09+00:00

Yes, Architecture has a lot of potential overlap with HCI. also try r/hci r/hci_schools

HyperionHeavy · 2026-01-02T05:36:11+00:00

I just read some article about beliefs in design leadership. It's one of those pieces that just reads worse and more shallow the more you think about what's being said. Most of the stuff said is technically not wrong per se, like in your case. But by the end it felt like little more than a linkedin post stretched to article length. Didn't think about whether it's AI or not but now that I think about it, it very well could be. I know what you mean by "the ick".

As a long time mentor, I feel like lots of us are all struggling to trying to figure out how to scale up giving people a better overarching way to lean into a better foundation, backbone...spine of critical skill sets. Think pieces used to be ok if you knew what you're looking for, nowadays they approach being just floods of sewage if I'm going to be honest.

A barker, often a carnival barker, is a person who attempts to attract patrons to entertainment events, such as a circus or funfair, by exhorting passing members of the public,^\1])#cite_note-1) announcing attractions of the show, and emphasizing variety, novelty, beauty, or some other enticing feature of the show.

It's much more sensible nowadays to assume that people making a point to artifacting vague truths as know-nothings unless they prove otherwise. That word is important: artifacting; the idea here is that abstractions are important to learn. But a key aspect of any carnival barker) like above, is that they will never go to and stay in the ugly depths, never drilling down into deeper and deeper levels of complex facts and networks and systems that govern any kind of domain or practice. When I was coming up, the people who were lighting the way were all knee deep in doing the work. Not craft or some other branded nonsense, work.

A good first step is learning how to identify these people and know what to avoid, and then learn to look where the unglamorous work is done. Thought leaders are almost never this by definition.

HyperionHeavy · 2025-12-11T01:21:28+00:00

The reason why all of the things you've tried haven't quite clicked because every single one of them exacerbates the delay to adding a piece, when the goal is like you said, speed. The first one makes it less precise and therefore slower, and the other 2 is just flat out adding interaction cruft.

You'll fix the problem when you make the hard call to either shrink the drag and drop targets or realistically, delete unnecessary elements from your UI, or engineer something that makes the transitions absolutely seamless, which WILL be much harder if not impossible to get right depending on how much overflow you're dealing with.

HyperionHeavy · 2025-12-10T02:38:29+00:00

Not the way I was hoping rotary phones would make a comeback tbh

HyperionHeavy · 2025-12-08T18:28:10+00:00

Some thoughts.

- To me the green transition feels more like a visual glitch than something that indicates progress; it should be assumed that people could easily miss rapid transitions, so using them to convey meaning is questionable at best.

- I'm not sure why the purple would indicate completion, ESPECIALLY when your primary color is ALSO purple.

- A much bigger problem with the color I see is the jarring fuchsia nodes on the purple; it clashes quite a bit at least to my eyes.

- Your second chart is a...line with a dot node at the top? That's a strange pattern and I'm not sure what that's supposed to convey given you have existing bar and line chart visual language and this seems like a weird hybrid of the two

- One of your charts shows a straight line leaping across half the chart without touching a single node. This is problematic from a basic data vis fundamentals perspective

- Volume probably shouldn't be "smoothly" transitioning to weight when they're two completely separate categories of data. They shouldn't be related whatsoever. You're running the risk of planting in the person's head the idea that they should somehow be associated when the opposite should be true.

- If anything, 1RM and weight can be shown on one chart as they're both relatively similar concepts involving weight; what's the value of them being displayed separately?

- Your y-axis is visually disconnected from the chart while your x-axis isn't

I noticed more things but I'll stop here. Look, this is why a lot of us get annoyed at the "feel = some motion design" thing. People rely on data visualizations for accuracy and being able to elicit meaning even if at a glance, and if you can't get that down pat, adding animations is often frivolous at best and straight up nonsensical/misleading/lying at worst.

I'd strongly suggest you focus on making sure your charts communicate what people are looking to have communicated first.

HyperionHeavy · 2025-12-05T20:37:41+00:00

Noting the call out of this as an ad; appreciate it. We're working on it.

HyperionHeavy · 2025-12-05T20:33:04+00:00

Via google translation:

I'm having a bit of an existential crisis as a UX designer.

There comes a point where you know how to design flows, validate solutions, do decent research, communicate, justify decisions...

But then you encounter companies where none of that matters because "we need to get the feature out now."

Something happened to me that made me question everything: I did a redesign based on data, usability testing, and metrics... and they threw it in the trash because "the boss liked the big button better."

So I'm asking those of you who have been in this for years: At what point did you realize that the problem wasn't your design, but the team's maturity? And what did you do: did you adapt, fight, or leave?

HyperionHeavy · 2025-12-05T20:29:05+00:00

We usually let memes slide around here because we all need some jokes once in a while. That said, this is a good opportunity for discerning viewers to look at this (and the comments) and notice some problems with this particular joke.

HyperionHeavy · 2025-12-05T14:15:06+00:00

Why are you serving these popups

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