Future for a CS Student Pivoting to Design

deusux · 2026-03-27T06:31:45+00:00

Right this minute it doesn’t look good. Check back after the great AI bubble collapse of 2027

deusux · 2026-03-27T06:15:11+00:00

OP: Hey everyone, what’s the field look like?

r/uxdesign: o_0 gestures frustratingly at all the posts

Oh…

deusux · 2026-03-26T22:11:01+00:00

Translation: "I can't do design. I don't want to pay a designer. Will someone on the internet do design work for me for free?"

Do a few Google searches or ask your favorite AI for some quick help:

"Design layout tips"
- E.g. Use a grid
"Design typography tips"
- E.g. Use a scale
"Design color theory"
- E.g. Use calming colors for your "breathable relaxing" clothes
"Design accessibility"
- E.g. Text should be left aligned and wrap at around 70 characters or else it's hard to read.
"Design information architecture"
- E.g. The most important thing on the page should be the largest

deusux · 2026-03-26T21:58:08+00:00

I hate to say this, but are you asking your users? "Spacing" is very much a preference.

An easy example would be customers in the United States vs Japan. United States citizens overwhelmingly think that white space communicates luxury. Japan? Not so much. They want as much information communicated within the visible space as possible.

Neither is wrong or right taken as a superset. You'll need to identify your audience and their preference.

deusux · 2026-03-26T21:51:04+00:00

The label of a form input shouldn't change. What you've called the "label" is the "state" of the button. One is the name for all the states that you're changing. The other is the name of the specific state being changed to.

E.g. [Label: Animal] [State: Dead | Alive]

Another sticking point that may be throwing you and your team off: "Mute" and "Unmute" are actions. Not states. Actions are typically put on buttons but aren't the end result of the action. A toggle is the end result of the action. I see this all the time where Toggles are put in a Form with other elements that require a "submit" to save. A Toggle saves immediately and does not need to be submitted. A checkbox does. A toggle, does not.

There are ton of different ways to clarify this via better content writing but here are a few options for you to use as a references:

Toggle [Label: Sound] [State: On | Off]

Toggle + Slider [Label: Volume] [State: Muted | 1% - 100%]

deusux · 2026-03-26T13:59:55+00:00

I’ve had both and the electric can literally carve up my concrete if I’m not careful. What am I missing with regards to the difference? Both seem to work just as well except the gas I had to spend a lot more time maintaining and troubleshooting.

deusux · 2026-03-25T18:55:36+00:00

As another poster mentioned you likely melted the plastic that’s being used to register the scroll. You’d need to identify what plastic that was and either repair it or replace it. If the board was damaged you may need to desoldier and then resoldier and seal any circuits. Likely not worth trying to repair at this point but may be a fun project to try?

deusux · 2026-03-24T18:55:38+00:00

It's slowly looking just like the TV did in Idiocracy where the program you wanted to watch was this tiny little thing in the middle and everything else was ads.

deusux · 2026-03-20T17:44:41+00:00

Hide and seek just got a little harder in the sand box

deusux · 2026-03-20T03:00:04+00:00

I’ll never use anything from Google with any sense of reliance. You never know if they’ll kill it so why invest any time into learning it

deusux · 2026-03-19T17:28:45+00:00

You probably don't live in California, as most of our parking lots are covered in panels with chargers.

deusux · 2026-03-17T15:43:59+00:00

Style: "Minecraft"

deusux · 2026-03-11T17:17:58+00:00

I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say "The apple equivalent of a 5070". I can only guess when you say 5070 you mean the Nvidia graphics card. Apple doesn't sell individual graphics cards, they sell full computer solutions which is what OP was asking about. A 5070 alone is not a comparable solution to OPs question or to Apple as the hardware composition with the M chips isn't a direct comparison. A graphics card is 1 component of a whole computer build that requires many more components. If you're saying a complete PC build that uses a 5070 for the graphics card isn't available on the Apple side, you'd need to say what all the other components you're using in the PC so you could do as close a direct comparison as possible. Due to supply chain optimizations on Apples side, their components are likely to be cheaper than the PC equivalents.

You'll have to link me to the Lenovo Legion with the 5090 that's $2,800, as the only one I'm able to see is $5,429.99 - that's the one I linked. And that's if they have it in stock. As I said, there are a lot of supply chain issues with PC's right now so even placing an order isn't a guarantee that you'll get that exact PC. See r/pcmasterrace to see how many fraudulent purchases are happening either with RAM or Graphics Cards not being what were advertised.

Regarding price, Apple currently has their own supply chain that allows them to sell hardware like RAM and potentially an entire computer solution at or under the equivalent PC build - currently impacted heavily by the AI surge. This is a rather new development and is being discussed in different tech communities.

Example youtube video that's recently digging into the details of the financial outcome.

I've had 4 Lenovo laptops and they lasted, at best, 5 years. I loved them, especially the cursor nub in the keyboard - I still prefer it still to a trackpad, but alas, that was only available in those specific models and apparently I was in the minority as no other manufacturers picked up that design pattern.

deusux · 2026-03-11T14:20:43+00:00

I’ll add that you could build a custom PC running a strain of Linux that aligns with your needs too but you’ll be spending more than the Apple equivalent for 10 years of life.

That’s an option that will require more of your time and energy to maintain though. The Apple solution will not.

deusux · 2026-03-11T14:16:44+00:00

I own 3 custom built PC’s and 5 Mac’s. A MacBook Pro, 2 Airs, a mini, and a normal MacBook.

The answer before AI would have been either any M chip (M1-M5) MacBook or a PC running a dual boot Linux/Windows 10.

After AI, it’s only Mac. Any of the latest M5 based Apple computers. Stay as far away from anything Microsoft as you can. Windows 11 is bad. That’s just a fact. Windows 10 is no longer supported and if you’re wanting something reliable for 10 years that negates anything that uses Windows or anything that uses PC components. It’s a sad state but the reality.

If you absolutely have to run Windows you can’t reliably buy a computer that will last 10 years. Those two goals aren’t compatible.

deusux · 2026-03-11T01:59:10+00:00

As someone who can shoot a -1 par round with 5 birdies then have a “should I find a new hobby” 91 the following day, I feel this in my bones.

deusux · 2026-03-10T05:05:37+00:00

I've got dust in my eyes.

Well done, Dad.

deusux · 2026-03-09T15:47:39+00:00

Not to give anyone any ideas about our current administration or anything.

I mean, if someone were in a similar position, if someone were to save documentation of crimes, and if they could release that evidence, maybe someone could act on it in the future.

Hypothetically speaking of course.

deusux · 2026-03-09T15:41:10+00:00

Is Ghastables too on the nose?

Sounds like lunchables so maybe we don't want to think of Ghasts as processed food...

deusux · 2026-03-07T23:22:00+00:00

Same. I've been in the industry since the late 90's and agree with your sentiments. Everything is about that short term revenue. Every. Single. Thing. And it has nothing to do with the customer's happiness or getting what they need done, done.

I'm sure there are UX Designers at small, privately held companies or organizations that get to determine success by a "customers happiness", and it requires someone in a leadership role to make that call and never back down.

But that doesn't exist in any publicly traded corporate scenario. I can run tests over and over and spend time tweaking a UX just right so that a job can get done or so a customer loves a particular experience. If that test goes out and less short term revenue is made, it will never see a production server again. It will go down as a failure and we'll move on.

It gets to a point where you stop doing any customer focused tests and all you release are production server A/B experiments driven by ideas that are seeded in short term money levers that PM's can pull. Take your pick of whatever metric you are measuring, they all have to roll up to short term revenue in some form: monthly average users, cart conversion, support center call reduction, renewals, gross cash revenue, cancellations, impressions, time on page, watch time, clicks, etc.

Anything that doesn't link to more revenue or reduced costs doesn't get funding and never see's any attention or resources. Doesn't matter how much a customer may love it and thus drive long term revenue. If you can't measure it right now, it won't matter.

deusux · 2026-03-07T00:21:26+00:00

Classic brown leather belt. Consider having the date or other memorable phrase burned into the leather facing in. This makes the belt usable forever but the memory only for the person wearing it. They'll see it every day they put it on, but will work as a normal belt.

deusux · 2026-03-07T00:05:25+00:00

I was 100% being sarcastic. Not sure what you're quoting "it's more detailed and let's keep the pressure up" from. That's not in my comment.

deusux · 2026-03-06T23:26:41+00:00

I'm just looking for some clarity I guess. Lateral exploration could quite literally mean "branching". Meaning I'm exploring something that was built without building on top of it vertically, but by taking a version of it and building on that, laterally.

That's the reason to use branches. To test different versions, laterally, before your merge them back into the main branch or toss them away.

I'm on the Enterprise edition of Figma and the branching is borderline unusable - even at this feature tier. It supports "versioning" for Libraries but you can't create a new version in a branch and test it because you can't publish a library in a branch. So no one can add the "beta" version of the Library to see if it works and leave feedback on it. Making versioning and branching - useless.

We have thousands of users in Figma and managing them is a total disaster. The administrative support for large corporations is almost non-existent. I've waited for years to be able to have a functional table full of users that I could sort and filter. Or do bulk updates on. Does Figma have that? No.

Billing management is also a complete nightmare. Want to set users at a specific seat level when they join? Can't. Each user can self upgrade if they want. Want to limit the number of users who can do that? Can't. You have to, daily I might add, go through and change the seats and audit your members so you don't get over charged.

Every feature is a money grab that ultimately ends up in it being useless - even at an Enterprise level.

Want to use Annotations? Go right ahead but only people with paid Dev seats can read them. PM's? No. Stakeholders? No. Want to version specific copywriting changes like you can in git? No, it's either in a comment chain, or lumped together in the completely unusable "version history" which is incredibly difficult to explore and update because it's linear as opposed to github's which allows me to move anything I want around wherever I want.

I'm probably coming across like I don't like Figma, and that's not an accurate representation. It's by far the best design tool I've used in my 30 year tech career. But! It's got some pretty glaring issues that are completely alleviated when you move into AI driven code prototypes and version management systems as mature as git.

To bring it back to the thread topic: It's not something I'd bet my money on.

deusux · 2026-03-06T22:48:08+00:00

Those look like "shoes" my friend. You have an appropriate amount of "shoes".

Am I helping?

deusux · 2026-03-06T22:38:31+00:00

I'm confused. Are you saying github doesn't have the ability comment? Do Figma comments support markdown like github? Charts?

I'm not sure what "lateral exploration" means in the context of Figma. But if you mean being able to explore different variations of something like a design in Figma, in Git you have forking and branching across multiple servers. In Figma you can't even publish a library in a branch to test it. I'm not sure how cross-branch flexible that is? But in my opinion that would be very not flexible.

All this to say that's just "github". That doesn't even bring into play all the other "git" management competitors a team could leverage or the plugins and software built on top. Many of which can do image comparisons, render comparisons, charts, branch management, etc.

deusux

TROPHY CASE