With the early bird deadline just 10 DAYS away, I am excited to let you know that we selected our UX Apprentice for the Fall 2026 cohort :)

If you are interested in participating in our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator, please follow this checklist to sign up. Don’t wait till the last minute!

• Connect with an alumni from our program to learn more about the course! You can connect with them on LinkedIn and schedule a call with them.

• Register for the Spring 2026 cohort by paying the $490 registration fee by the September 10th early bird deadline. You can email me or set up another call with me if you have more questions before registering. LIVE classes start Sunday September 20!

• Use our holiday discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on the course registration.

• Book a call with me to discuss your project topic or your UX career goals for coaching so that we have a plan before we go through the curriculum and the mentorship/coaching together.

• You can pay the remainder of the tuition in one lump sum ($6960) due by Sunday September 20 when class starts. If you can pay in one lump sum, we give you $500 off on the lump sum tuition payment using the discount code 500-OFF.

• You can also pay the remainder of the tuition ($6960) within a 4-month payment plan or 7-month payment plan (early bird tuition prices). There are no discounts for monthly payments.

Let me know if you have any questions as you consider your options and make decisions regarding your UX career goals.

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman.

P.S. Book a 20-minute call with us if you have questions and want to see if this is the right option for you!

P.P.S. Some homework for you as you are making your decision. 1) Watch our 60-minute YouTube lessons on the mindsets needed to pivot to UX in 2026. 2) Watch our 6-minute YouTube lesson on tactical ways to land a UX job in 2026- no degree required. 3) Work through our UX Hackathon in FigJam to scope out a UX project topic for the 7-Month UX Design Accelerator.

On the one hand, we have the DIYers who will put together imperfect UX work into a portfolio too quickly, trading quality for speed to be able to apply to UX jobs fast… but then getting frustrated and giving up easily when they don’t see success. On the other hand, we have the perfectionists who spend weeks and months procrastinating on publishing their case studies, overthinking their work and obsessing over the small details. Both sides fear failure, but take on completely opposing approaches to the UX portfolio.

Welcome back to UX Challenge #33 on the UX Psychology behind everyday brands. I help UX career changers land six-figure UX jobs and interviews at brands like CVS, Capital One, GE, Reddit, Nike, and even Google. Connect with me on Linkedin!

So what’s the balance? #1 It’s important to set a quality standard when writing your UX case studies, so that you’re not auto-rejected by recruiters and hiring managers who cannot understand the story you are trying to tell or see the value of your designs. I’ve talked to UX career changers who’ve been stuck in 12-24 month loops of being rejected from UX jobs, and this is a clear sign that they need to change their UX job search approach. If this is you and you are considering our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator, then book a 20-minute strategy call with me today to chat.

#2 It’s important to also set your limit for what’s “good enough” to publish, even if it’s not perfect. By publishing what’s good enough, you stop self-selecting out of UX jobs that you might be qualified to apply for! I’ve talked to several perfectionists who spend months debating whether or not to publish a UX case study or full UX portfolio – those months debating often end up costing them hundreds of UX jobs to apply to!

So are you ready to take on a balanced approach to UX case study writing? Here’s the secret to creating a successful UX portfolio: Don’t do what everyone else is doing! Instead, build a focused UX portfolio based on your PERSONAL strengths, expertise and passions.

We’ve noticed so many Google Coursera grads and UX bootcamp grads finish their curriculums with irrelevant portfolio case studies that are not likely to get them hired. Why is that?

• Cookie-cutter portfolio pieces: They are graduating with UX consulting case studies that dozens of other students have in their portfolios. Or they were assigned project topics like building a weather app or dog training app. But how many weather apps and dog training apps are actually hiring UX designers or UX researchers at the moment?

• A focus on visuals rather than storytelling: We’ve reviewed hundreds of UX portfolios from a variety of UX bootcamp grads and Google Coursera grads. We’ve noticed that their portfolios tend to emphasize the end results or the solution, without providing enough context on how they got there or why they made the design decisions that they did. It’s really important to be able to talk through the project context, design process, and decision making involved when building a UX portfolio.

• Irrelevant portfolio pieces: There’s often a HUGE mismatch between UX bootcamp grads past work experience and what’s in their UX portfolio. For example, they might have a stellar 5-10 year career in healthcare, education, or marketing BUT their portfolio only showcases dog training apps, cooking apps, and travel apps (i.e., nothing related to their actual career or industry expertise).

• No business model for UX case studies: The harsh truth is that an app or idea or design with no solid business model is not valued by executives and stakeholders with business, tech, and operations expertise. Truly useful and impactful design aligns user needs with the business model, as well as tech and operations constraints. Truly useful and impactful design scales as the business scales. A lot of UX portfolios don’t showcase this! It’s not just about pretty aesthetics!

Before you get started with ANY UX bootcamp or UX course or grad program, do the following to set yourself up for success and really get the most out of your education.

• Evaluate your passions & expertise: Don’t build cookie-cutter UX portfolio pieces that everyone else is building! Instead, evaluate your passions and expertise. If you are a professional with 2-10 years of experience in another field making a career change to UX, then evaluate the industries you worked for in the past. Can you specialize in UX for those industries because of your expertise? For example, Valerie leveraged her 10+ years of expertise in healthcare, to land a UX lead role at CVS corporate. If you are a new grad or in the early stages of your career, can you define for yourself what industries you are most passionate about?

• Balance emotions & logic in your storytelling: Most cookie-cutter UX case studies only focus on articulating user needs, forgetting to showcase the emotional journey a user or customer must make as they navigate problems and frustrations. In addition to this, UX researchers and UX designers must showcase both qualitative and quantitative data to justify why they chose to focus on a specific user problem and why they chose to design and build a specific solution. This qualitative and quantitative data is crucial when it comes to persuading senior executives and stakeholders about the value of the product ideation and implementation. Balance between emotional storytelling and highlighting impactful metrics is key. Check out how Andrea weaves a UX story that balances her passion for fashion design, e-commerce business models, user needs and emotions, and technical/operations constraints.

• Create relevant portfolio pieces: Most UX portfolios contain 3-5 case studies. You HAVE to ensure that ALL your case studies are relevant to your passions and expertise if you want to land your dream UX job. For example, Valerie created 2 healthcare case studies as part of the Ideate Labs Live UX course, but also rebranded some of her previous healthcare expertise to showcase 3 additional case studies in UX research and service design, skills she had used while optimizing processes and operations at the healthcare practice where she had previously been working.

• Become an interdisciplinary designer or researcher: You have to be able to articulate how the business, tech teams, and operations teams will be impacted by your designs. What are the consequences of your designs on these teams? It is crucial to understand the business model for the product or service you are designing to be able to articulate how your designs will impact the business, or scale as the business scales. These are some common knowledge gaps that UX bootcamp grads and even seasoned UX designers have! We address these gaps in our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator.

If you are serious about committing to the UX Woman 7-Month Accelerator program for our Fall 2026 cohort, here is a checklist of HW and to-dos: We are just 2 weeks away from the early bird deadline on September 10!

• Connect with an alumni from our program to learn more about the course! You can connect with them on LinkedIn and schedule a call with them.

• Register for the Spring 2026 cohort by paying the $490 registration fee by the September 10th early bird deadline. You can email me or set up another call with me if you have more questions before registering. LIVE classes start Sunday September 20!

• Use our holiday discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on the course registration.

• Book a call with me to discuss your project topic or your UX career goals for coaching so that we have a plan before we go through the curriculum and the mentorship/coaching together.

• You can pay the remainder of the tuition in one lump sum ($6960) due by Sunday September 20 when class starts. If you can pay in one lump sum, we give you $500 off on the lump sum tuition payment using the discount code 500-OFF.

• You can also pay the remainder of the tuition ($6960) within a 4-month payment plan or 7-month payment plan (early bird tuition prices). There are no discounts for monthly payments.

Let me know if you have any questions as you consider your options and make decisions regarding your UX career goals.

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman.

P.S. Book a 20-minute call with us if you have questions and want to see if this is the right option for you!

I faced huge identity changes early in my career when I went from being a mechanical engineer to sports writer to customer service manager to UX designer. So who are you without your current career path or job? And how are you going to find out? This would mean navigating the uncertainty that comes with changing your professional identity.

Welcome back to UX Challenge #33 on the UX Psychology behind everyday brands. I help UX career changers land six-figure UX jobs and interviews at some of the biggest Fortune 500 brands. Connect with me on LinkedIn!

#1 Define your core values for yourself. What do you value in life? And how can you bring your values to your new UX career? We’ve worked with UX career changers who are passionate about specific causes like accessibility-based design, or designing experiences for underserved communities.

#2 Define your core interests for yourself. What are you passionate about? And how can you bring that passion and purpose to your new UX career? We’ve worked with UX career changers who’ve pursued interests in film or healthcare to focus their UX portfolios on UX projects for the entertainment industry or healthtech industries.

But it’s not enough to simply define your core values and interests, without actually acting on them. Your values and interests are what you say you value. But your character is defined by what you actually act on, what you consistently work towards, despite setbacks and challenges.

So ask yourself: Do you truly want a UX career, where you are willing to consistently work towards it despite a competitive job market?

We built a 7-Month UX Design Accelerator ($7450) with 4 months of 0-1 Product Design curriculum and 3 months of 1-on-1 UX career coaching for the job search. The early bird deadline to register is just over 2 weeks away on September 10! This is for the folks willing to take consistent action over the next 7 months to land their dream UX job and begin their UX career.

Our Fall 2026 cohort coincides with the busiest hiring season of 2027, so that you can land UX job interviews as you go through the career coaching phase of our curriculum. There are essentially two UX hiring seasons every year:

• At the beginning of a new year (i.e, 2027): Just around Thanksgiving and the winter holidays, the new year’s budget at each company is set. This gives hiring managers a chance to assess hiring needs and propose budgets for the new year based on how the business is doing.

• After summer holidays: Hiring tends to slow down over the summer holidays, and picks back up between September through November, when the remainder of the year’s budget is re-evaluated to see if additional hires can be made.

So as a UX career changer entering the UX job market, what are some transferable skills that could lead to a mid-senior level UX Research role, UX Design role or Product Design role?

• Project management and project scoping expertise

• Stakeholder management

• Facilitating and leading workshops and meetings

• Service design (improving and optimizing internal processes)

• Cross-functional collaboration

• Measuring impact (revenue generated, costs and time saved, etc.)

• Agile development management

While these transferable skills are incredibly valuable when rebranding to mid-senior level UX research and product design roles, it is also important to address UX knowledge gaps.

We’ve found that addressing the following UX knowledge gaps in our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator program helps professionals tell a compelling story about their UX expertise during interviews with recruiters and hiring managers.

• Advanced UX research methods: We’ve helped our alumni with learning about discovery UX research, trauma-informed UX research practices, facilitating UX workshops and ideation sessions, as well as conducting observational studies. We’ve also helped them collect quantitative data around their ideation by setting up pretotype experiments to justify which idea would be most likely to succeed in the market.

• Product scoping, feature scoping, project scoping: We teach our alumni to find “hair on fire” problems that their users are facing, that require immediate solving. We also teach them to evaluate product and feature ideas from a business, technical, and operations perspective to really think through the viability and feasibility of these ideas. This requires really understanding the business model for their product or service.

• Product positioning & product marketing: We teach our alumni about blue ocean strategy, helping them position their startup product idea in an under-saturated or invisible market where they can provide low-cost, high-value solutions to a community that has been ignored by mainstream markets and brands. We help them scope aspirational and innovative products and feature ideas with obvious differentiators that stand out from competitor brands.

• Product pricing, monetization & business models: A HUGE reason to build and understand the business model of your product or service is to understand how to price your product or service given operations costs and constraints. From a business perspective, it’s important to design, build, maintain, and scale a product in a sustainable manner, expanding features from year to year, quarter to quarter.

• How a product scales as a business scales: It’s important to start designing a product MVP (minimum viable product), the simplest version of your product that can be built fast and monetized with your target market. However, as the business grows and scales, resources will be available to scale and expand product features as well. It’s important to strike a balance between how the business scales versus how the product scales with it!

This is exactly how some of UX Woman our alumni were able to rebrand their past careers into senior UX research roles.

• Aliyah transformed a 5-year marketing career into UX research at Reddit.

• Velvet transformed a 5-year schoolteacher career into UX research.

• Jennifer rebranded a 10-year therapist career into UX research.

• Valerie rebranded a 10-year healthcare career into a UX lead role.

• Yasmine rebranded a 10-year Starbucks manager career into a UXR role.

We have also had alumni rebrand to mid-senior product designer roles by addressing the above knowledge gaps:

• Kristin doubled her salary by becoming a senior product designer.

• Angelina doubled her salary by becoming a senior product designer.

• Ilona doubled her salary as a UX designer for Keller Williams.

• Anna became a UX designer at Capital One.
  

So our challenge for you today is to think about transferable skills you might have developed in the last 2-10 years and see if you can rebrand that into a UX research career.

• Book a call with us to talk through these transferable skills and we can work together to see what UX career path and career level makes the most sense for YOU.

• Watch our video about mindsets for UX career changers to have amidst a tight job market and tech layoffs from the last few years.

So are you ready to think through your transferrable skills and come up with a UX career blueprint tailored to YOU? As we approach the back-to-school season in September, I wanted to see if you were considering investing in a UX course for yourself.

If you are serious about committing to the UX Woman 7-Month Accelerator program for our Fall 2026 cohort, here is a checklist of HW and to-dos:

• Connect with an alumni from our program to learn more about the course! You can connect with them on Linkedin and schedule a call with them.

• Register for the Spring 2026 cohort by paying the $490 registration fee by the September 10th early bird deadline. You can email me or set up another call with me if you have more questions before registering. LIVE classes start Sunday September 20!

• Use our holiday discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on the course registration.

• Book a call with me to discuss your project topic or your UX career goals for coaching so that we have a plan before we go through the curriculum and the mentorship/coaching together.

• You can pay the remainder of the tuition in one lump sum ($6960) due by Sunday September 20 when class starts. If you can pay in one lump sum, we give you $500 off on the lump sum tuition payment using the discount code 500-OFF.

• You can also pay the remainder of the tuition ($6960) within a 4-month payment plan or 7-month payment plan (early bird tuition prices). There are no discounts for monthly payments.

Let me know if you have any questions as you consider your options and make decisions regarding your UX career goals.

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman.

P.S. Book a 20-minute call with us if you have questions and want to see if this is the right option for you!

But guess what? While they are excited for a brand new career in UX, it doesn’t always mean that they have to start from scratch! A lot of seasoned professionals and career changers feel a lack of confidence in their UX design capabilities, which leads them to apply to junior or entry-level UX design jobs ($85K-$120K per year).

While it is true that their Figma skills could use more honing and refining, UX design is not the only viable UX career path for a lot of these professionals. We’ve helped a lot of mid-senior level professionals and UX bootcamp grads rebrand to mid-senior level UX research and UX lead roles ($130K - $240K) after working with them to rebrand transferable skills from past professions into their UX profession.

What are some transferable skills that could lead to a mid-senior level UX Research role or Product Design role?

• Project management and project scoping expertise

• Stakeholder management

• Facilitating and leading workshops and meetings

• Service design (improving and optimizing internal processes)

• Cross-functional collaboration

• Measuring impact (revenue generated, costs and time saved, etc.)

• Agile development management

While these transferable skills are incredibly valuable when rebranding to mid-senior level UX research and product design roles, it is also important to address UX knowledge gaps.

We’ve found that addressing the following UX knowledge gaps in our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator program helps professionals tell a compelling story about their UX expertise during interviews with recruiters and hiring managers.

• Advanced UX research methods: We’ve helped our alumni with learning about discovery UX research, trauma-informed UX research practices, facilitating UX workshops and ideation sessions, as well as conducting observational studies. We’ve also helped them collect quantitative data around their ideation by setting up pretotype experiments to justify which idea would be most likely to succeed in the market.

• Product scoping, feature scoping, project scoping: We teach our alumni to find “hair on fire” problems that their users are facing, that require immediate solving. We also teach them to evaluate product and feature ideas from a business, technical, and operations perspective to really think through the viability and feasibility of these ideas. This requires really understanding the business model for their product or service.

• Product positioning & product marketing: We teach our alumni about blue ocean strategy, helping them position their startup product idea in an under-saturated or invisible market where they can provide low-cost, high-value solutions to a community that has been ignored by mainstream markets and brands. We help them scope aspirational and innovative products and feature ideas with obvious differentiators that stand out from competitor brands.

• Product pricing, monetization & business models: A HUGE reason to build and understand the business model of your product or service is to understand how to price your product or service given operations costs and constraints. From a business perspective, it’s important to design, build, maintain, and scale a product in a sustainable manner, expanding features from year to year, quarter to quarter.

• How a product scales as a business scales: It’s important to start designing a product MVP (minimum viable product), the simplest version of your product that can be built fast and monetized with your target market. However, as the business grows and scales, resources will be available to scale and expand product features as well. It’s important to strike a balance between how the business scales versus how the product scales with it!

This is exactly how some of UX Woman our alumni were able to rebrand their past careers into senior UX research roles.

• Aliyah transformed a 5-year marketing career into UX research at Reddit.

• Velvet transformed a 5-year schoolteacher career into UX research.

• Jennifer rebranded a 10-year therapist career into UX research.

• Valerie rebranded a 10-year healthcare career into a UX lead role.

• Yasmine rebranded a 10-year Starbucks manager career into a UXR role.

We have also had alumni rebrand to mid-senior product designer roles by addressing the above knowledge gaps:

• Kristin doubled her salary by becoming a senior product designer.

• Angelina doubled her salary by becoming a senior product designer.

• Ilona doubled her salary as a UX designer for Keller Williams.

• Anna became a UX designer at Capital One.
  

So our challenge for you today is to think about transferable skills you might have developed in the last 2-10 years and see if you can rebrand that into a UX research career.

• Book a call with us to talk through these transferable skills and we can work together to see what UX career path and career level makes the most sense for YOU.

• Watch our video about mindsets for UX career changers to have amidst a tight job market and tech layoffs from the last few years.

So are you ready to think through your transferrable skills and come up with a UX career blueprint tailored to YOU? As we approach back-to-school season in September, I wanted to see if you were considering investing in a UX course for yourself.

If you are serious about committing to the UX Woman 7-Month Accelerator program for our Fall 2026 cohort, here is a checklist of HW and to-dos:

• Connect with an alumni from our program to learn more about the course! You can connect with them on Linkedin and schedule a call with them.

• Register for the Spring 2026 cohort by paying the $490 registration fee by the September 10th early bird deadline. You can email me or set up another call with me if you have more questions before registering. LIVE classes start Sunday September 20!

• Use our holiday discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on the course registration.

• Book a call with me to discuss your project topic or your UX career goals for coaching so that we have a plan before we go through the curriculum and the mentorship/coaching together.

• You can pay the remainder of the tuition in one lump sum ($6960) due by Sunday September 20 when class starts. If you can pay in one lump sum, we give you $500 off on the lump sum tuition payment using the discount code 500-OFF.

• You can also pay the remainder of the tuition ($6960) within a 4-month payment plan or 7-month payment plan (early bird tuition prices). There are no discounts for monthly payments.

Let me know if you have any questions as you consider your options and make decisions regarding your UX career goals in 2026 and 2027!

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman.

P.S. Don’t forget to gift yourself something by investing in your future this summer. If you are ready to put your stake in the ground and start building with intention, I recommend registering for the Fall 2026 cohort TODAY to save your seat! And don’t be a stranger! You can use the summer discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on your registration.

Okay, back to your POV: You lied on your UX resume and now you’re hired as the solo product designer at a stealth AI startup. What would you consider when building a design system for a startup product from scratch? Would you start with the branding, technical constraints, user problems, or monetization strategy? The answer is all of the above, but the order matters, so let’s break it down.

Welcome back to UX Challenge #30 on the UX psychology behind everyday brands. I’m Samaya, your UX Woman and I help you land six-figure UX jobs, sharing my experiences working with brands like Disney+, Hulu, Marvel, Vanguard, and more.

It’s important to start with user problems. Did you know that 40% of startups fail because nobody actually needed or wanted their product? If there is a need, then startups often get outcompeted by other bigger competitor players in the market. This will be true for AI startups and products as well in the age of AI.

Next, design ideation and working closely with developers to work within technical constraints. What pie in the sky solutions can you design to solve tough user problems? And how might you simplify those solutions based on what’s technically and operationally feasible.

That brings me to the business perspective. There is no business without a clear monetization strategy or a solution that users are actually willing to pay for. So that is the next priority- a lot of startups try freemium models to get users hooked on using a product for a brief time before purchase.

And finally - branding and graphics! Surprised? But this is really just the cherry on top. Companies rebrand all the time. The key to building a successful design system is to focus on the substance, not the looks.

To land a UX job in a competitive job market, you need to build a UX portfolio that is far from cookie-cutter. Here’s the secret to creating a successful UX portfolio that lands you UX design jobs: Don’t do what everyone else is doing! Instead, build a focused UX portfolio based on your PERSONAL strengths, expertise and passions.

We’ve noticed so many Google Coursera grads and UX bootcamp grads finish their curriculums with irrelevant portfolio case studies that are not likely to get them hired. Why is that?

• Cookie-cutter portfolio pieces: They are graduating with UX consulting case studies that dozens of other students have in their portfolios. Or they were assigned project topics like building a weather app or dog training app. But how many weather apps and dog training apps are actually hiring UX designers or UX researchers at the moment?

• A focus on visuals rather than storytelling: We’ve reviewed hundreds of UX portfolios from a variety of UX bootcamp grads and Google Coursera grads. We’ve noticed that their portfolios tend to emphasize the end results or the solution, without providing enough context on how they got there or why they made the design decisions that they did. It’s really important to be able to talk through the project context, design process, and decision making involved when building a UX portfolio.

• Irrelevant portfolio pieces: There’s often a HUGE mismatch between UX bootcamp grads past work experience and what’s in their UX portfolio. For example, they might have a stellar 5-10 year career in healthcare, education, or marketing BUT their portfolio only showcases dog training apps, cooking apps, and travel apps (i.e., nothing related to their actual career or industry expertise).

• No business model for UX case studies: The harsh truth is that an app or idea or design with no solid business model is not valued by executives and stakeholders with business, tech, and operations expertise. Truly useful and impactful design aligns user needs with the business model, as well as tech and operations constraints. Truly useful and impactful design scales as the business scales. A lot of UX portfolios don’t showcase this! It’s not just about pretty aesthetics!

Before you get started with ANY UX bootcamp or UX course or grad program, do the following to set yourself up for success and really get the most out of your education.

• Evaluate your passions & expertise: Don’t build cookie-cutter UX portfolio pieces that everyone else is building! Instead, evaluate your passions and expertise. If you are a professional with 2-10 years of experience in another field making a career change to UX, then evaluate the industries you worked for in the past. Can you specialize in UX for those industries because of your expertise? For example, Valerie leveraged her 10+ years of expertise in healthcare, to land a UX lead role at CVS corporate. If you are a new grad or in the early stages of your career, can you define for yourself what industries you are most passionate about?

• Balance emotions & logic in your storytelling: Most cookie-cutter UX case studies only focus on articulating user needs, forgetting to showcase the emotional journey a user or customer must make as they navigate problems and frustrations. In addition to this, UX researchers and UX designers must showcase both qualitative and quantitative data to justify why they chose to focus on a specific user problem and why they chose to design and build a specific solution. This qualitative and quantitative data is crucial when it comes to persuading senior executives and stakeholders about the value of the product ideation and implementation. Balance between emotional storytelling and highlighting impactful metrics is key. Check out how Andrea weaves a UX story that balances her passion for fashion design, e-commerce business models, user needs and emotions, and technical/operations constraints.

• Create relevant portfolio pieces: Most UX portfolios contain 3-5 case studies. You HAVE to ensure that ALL your case studies are relevant to your passions and expertise if you want to land your dream UX job. For example, Valerie created 2 healthcare case studies as part of the UX Woman Live UX course, but also rebranded some of her previous healthcare expertise to showcase 3 additional case studies in UX research and service design, skills she had used while optimizing processes and operations at the healthcare practice where she had previously been working.

• Become an interdisciplinary designer or researcher: You have to be able to articulate how the business, tech teams, and operations teams will be impacted by your designs. What are the consequences of your designs on these teams? It is crucial to understand the business model for the product or service you are designing to be able to articulate how your designs will impact the business, or scale as the business scales. These are some common knowledge gaps that UX bootcamp grads and even seasoned UX designers have! We address these gaps in our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator starting on September 20th! Come join us for the Fall 2026 cohort by registering for the course here.

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman.

P.S. With the early bird deadline just 3 weeks away, I recommend registering for the Fall 2026 cohort TODAY to save your seat! And don’t be a stranger! You can use the summer discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on your registration.

P.P.S. Don’t be a stranger! Book a 20-minute strategy call with us to see if the 7-Month UX Design Accelerator is the right fit for you right now.

Welcome back to UX Challenge #29 on the UX Psychology behind everyday brands. I’m Samaya, your UX Woman, and I help UX career changers land six-figure UX jobs and interviews at brands like CVS, Capital One, GE, Reddit, Nike, and even Google, sharing my experiences working for brands like Disney+, Hulu, Marvel, ABC, Vanguard and more.

It can feel terrifying to leave behind a current career or educational background that you are certain of, where you have already built up your reputation, your value and your expertise. In fact, over the years, the certainty, competence, and clarity with which you approach your current job can become ingrained into your very identity, becoming a part of who you are.

I faced huge identity changes early in my career when I went from being a mechanical engineer to sports writer to customer service manager to UX designer. So who are you without your current career path or job? And how are you going to find out? This would mean navigating the uncertainty that comes with changing your professional identity. We created a UX career changer hackathon with 4 hours of interactive FigJam activities to help you work through this! So how do you work through your fear of uncertainty?

#1 Define your core values for yourself. What do you value in life? And how can you bring your values to your new UX career? We’ve worked with UX career changers who are passionate about specific causes like accessibility-based design, or designing experiences for underserved communities. You can connect with them here to hear about their experiences going through our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator.

#2 Define your core interests for yourself. What are you passionate about? And how can you bring that passion and purpose to your new UX career? We’ve worked with UX career changers who’ve pursued interests in film or healthcare to focus their UX portfolios on UX projects for the entertainment industry or healthtech industries. The specificity of their UX portfolio has helped them attract the right recruiters and hiring managers when tackling the job search.

So are you going to let your past identity stop you from your future one? If the answer is no, then you will have to work through your fear of uncertainty to get to the other side. We’ve worked with UX career changers in our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator to help them work through their fear of failure, which often shows up around how they think about their UX portfolio.

On the one hand, we have the DIYers who will put together imperfect UX work into a portfolio too quickly, trading quality for speed to be able to apply to UX jobs fast… but then getting frustrated and giving up easily when they don’t see success. On the other hand, we have the perfectionists who spend weeks and months procrastinating on publishing their case studies, overthinking their work and obsessing over the small details. Both sides fear failure, but take on completely opposing approaches to the UX portfolio. So what’s the balance?

#1 It’s important to set a quality standard when writing your UX case studies, so that you’re not auto-rejected by recruiters and hiring managers who cannot understand the story you are trying to tell or see the value of your designs. I’ve talked to UX career changers who’ve been stuck in 12-24 month loops of being rejected from UX jobs, and this is a clear sign that they need to change their UX job search approach. We provide 3 months of 1-on-1 UX career coaching within our 7-Month Accelerator and help you with working sessions for UX resume rewrites, Linkedin profile rewrites, UX case study rewrites, UX portfolio reviews, and UX interview prep.

#2 It’s important to also set your limit for what’s “good enough” to publish, even if it’s not perfect. By publishing what’s good enough, you stop self-selecting out of UX jobs that you might be qualified to apply for! I’ve talked to several perfectionists who spend months debating whether or not to publish a UX case study or full UX portfolio – those months debating often end up costing them hundreds of UX jobs to apply to! At UX Woman, we help you work through your fear of failure so that you can build a robust and intentional UX portfolio in 7 months. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to exist so that you can put your best foot forward for applying to UX jobs.

So are you ready to take on a balanced approach to UX case study writing? If you can make that promise to yourself to show up consistently and commit to working on yourself so that you can land a UX job, then:

• Connect with an alumni from our program to learn more about the course! You can connect with them on Linkedin and schedule a call with them.

• Register for the Spring 2026 cohort by paying the $490 registration fee by the September 10th early bird deadline which is just 4 WEEKs away. You can set up a call with me if you have more questions before registering.

• Use our holiday discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on the course registration.

• Book a call with me to discuss your project topic or your UX career goals for coaching so that we have a plan before we go through the curriculum and the mentorship/coaching together.

• You can pay the remainder of the tuition in one lump sum ($6960) due by Sunday September 20 when class starts. If you can pay in one lump sum, we give you $500 off on the lump sum tuition payment using the discount code 500-OFF.

• You can also pay the remainder of the tuition ($6960) within a 4-month payment plan or 7-month payment plan (early bird tuition prices). There are no discounts for monthly payments.

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman

P.S. We already have a handful of folks registered for the Fall 2026 cohort. If you are ready to put your stake in the ground and start building with intention, I recommend registering for the Fall 2026 cohort TODAY to save your seat! And don’t be a stranger! You can use the summer discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on your registration.

Welcome back to UX Challenge #28 on the UX Psychology behind everyday brands. I’m Samaya, your UX Woman, and I help UX career changers land six-figure UX jobs and interviews at brands like CVS, Capital One, GE, Reddit, Nike, and even Google, sharing my experiences working for brands like Disney, Hulu, Marvel, Vanguard and more.

#1. Are you leaning towards a strategic UX career path like UX research or strategic product design? Or are you learning towards a more visually oriented UX career path like UX/UI design or interaction design? Think through your current strengths and weaknesses as you consider both avenues. You can take our UX personality quiz to help you make a decision and focus on 1 UX career path.

#2. Are you leveraging transferable skillsets from past career paths or educational expertise you’ve developed? If you’ve had a previous career that’s lasted between 2-10 years, you should be considering transferable skillsets you’ve developed that can help you land UX jobs. We’ve helped some UX career changers even land senior level UX jobs due to their transferable skills! You can connect with our alumni to hear about their transitions into senior UX roles after going through our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator.

#3 Are you clear on what your UX portfolio should include? Your UX portfolio should focus on 1-2 UX career paths and 1-2 industries you would like to work in, such as healthcare, finance, ecommerce, entertainment, social media or B2B SAAS. Get clear on what you would like to pursue before applying blindly to any and every UX job! During UX career consult calls I have with our community, I always encourage them to research who is hiring in their industry of interest (e.g., healthcare) and find the gaps in those organizations. What are they missing or overlooking in terms of healthcare problems? What invisible markets are they ignoring or dismissing? By solving those problems in your UX portfolio, you will stand out as a candidate.

The 3 biggest problems that UX Woman’s 7-Month UX Design Accelerator solves is helping you stay on track and stay focused to build an intentional UX portfolio that attracts the right recruiters and hiring managers to YOU, in line with your UX career goals and vision for your creative direction. How do we help?

#1: We help you stay focused on 1 UX career path, even when you might be tempted to take on a generalist approach. We helped one alumni land a UX research role at Reddit after convincing her to stop prioritizing UX design jobs, when her expertise was clearly more geared towards a strategic UX career path. We teach the end-to-end UX design process within our 4-month UX curriculum, helping you learn advanced UX skillsets like qualitative and quantitative UX methods, business strategy, service design, product and feature scoping, product positioning, and AI product design.

#2: We help you learn how to rebrand past transferable skillsets as UX research, service design, or design systems work. We’ve worked with educators, healthcare professionals, graphic designers, architects and more to consider both their strategic skillsets and visual skillsets from their past careers. These skillsets can often be rebranded to attract the right recruiters and hiring managers to them. After the 4-months of 0-1 product design curriculum, we offer 3 months of 1-on-1 UX career coaching where we help our students with UX resume writing, LinkedIn profile writing, UX case study templates, and UX interview prep.

#3: We help you build an intentional UX portfolio with 3-5 UX case studies that attract the right recruiters and hiring managers to YOU. We’ve spoken with hundreds of UX career changes within our community who have been getting burned out by negative news headlines on layoffs or AI, and even overwhelmed by the amount of UX learning resources out there like the Google Coursera course and the school of YouTube. Unfortunately, most free UX resources don’t provide the depth of knowledge you need to successfully pivot into UX. Our UX Woman curriculum provides over 50+ hours of UX knowledge that will help you gain an edge and build a UX portfolio that isn’t cookie-cutter or generic, like the thousands of other junior UX portfolios out there.

However, this course is not for everybody. Our mentors and instructors put in a lot of care and intention towards delivering great UX learning and UX career coaching. Over the next 4 WEEKS till the early bird deadline (September 10), we are looking to work with 5 folks who are ready to:

#1: Work through their uncertainty to focus on 1 UX career path and 1-2 industries to specialize in for their UX portfolio. This involves doing some soul searching on your end to define an intentional path forward for yourself that aligns with past expertise and future passion. Take 4 hours within our online UX Design Hackathon to define this for yourself and then book a 20-minute strategy consult with us to talk through your direction!

#2: Work through fears around career identity changes that comes with a rebrand into UX. Learn about how your transferable skillsets from past careers can translate as service design, and start to get comfortable with building a new career identity for yourself… this often means breaking up with your old identity, which can be tough!

#3: Put in the work required to build an intentional UX portfolio, UX resume, and LinkedIn profile that reflects a rebrand to UX. Learn about the state of UX in 2026 and how you can pivot into UX design with success today.

Some tough love for today: there are no shortcuts into UX. You have to commit to doing the inner work on yourself, as well as the work of learning UX design and building a UX portfolio. This requires a commitment to learning and growing, consistently showing up for yourself every day and every week over the next 6-9 months.

If you can make that promise to yourself to show up consistently and commit to working on yourself so that you can land a UX job, then:

• Connect with an alumni from our program to learn more about the course! You can connect with them on Linkedin and schedule a call with them.

• Register for the Spring 2026 cohort by paying the $490 registration fee by the September 10th early bird deadline which is just 4 WEEKs away. You can set up a call with me if you have more questions before registering.

• Use our holiday discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on the course registration.

• Book a call with me to discuss your project topic or your UX career goals for coaching so that we have a plan before we go through the curriculum and the mentorship/coaching together.

• You can pay the remainder of the tuition in one lump sum ($6960) due by Sunday September 20 when class starts. If you can pay in one lump sum, we give you $500 off on the lump sum tuition payment using the discount code 500-OFF.

• You can also pay the remainder of the tuition ($6960) within a 4-month payment plan or 7-month payment plan (early bird tuition prices). There are no discounts for monthly payments.

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman

P.S. We already have a handful of folks registered for the Fall 2026 cohort. If you are ready to put your stake in the ground and start building with intention, I recommend registering for the Fall 2026 cohort TODAY to save your seat! And don’t be a stranger! You can use the summer discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on your registration.

Welcome back to UX Challenge $27 on the UX psychology behind everyday brands. I’m Samaya, your UX Woman and I help you land six-figure UX jobs, sharing my experiences working with brands like Disney+, Hulu, Marvel, Vanguard, and more.

Airbnb splits their navigation into primary and secondary sets of filters using progressive disclosure. This is a design pattern where UX designers gradually display and reveal more information as they user needs it while they work through a flow.It helps users not become overwhelmed with too many options at once.

Airbnb does a great job of allowing users to browse through stays without needing to click on them by providing just the right amount of imagery and stay context.

This is much better than navigation patterns you might see on Marriott’s website here, where not as much info is revealed on the browsing page, pushing the user to click into one option at a time…

Or check out Zillow’s website here, again where we can select all filters needed at once, the opposite of Airbnb’s progressive disclosure approach.

My question is- can we reveal even more information on Airbnb’s browsing page to help users make better decisions when clicking into one specific stay? What if we highlighted specific in-home features like Wifi, Air Conditioning, and Pets Allowed directly on the tile displays instead? Would that work?

I’ve taught live UX courses for over 5 years and love it when my students land UX jobs and interviews with brands like Reddit, CVS, Nike, Google, GE, Capital One and more.

So my question to you is: what are you going to do TODAY if you want to be hired at a travel company like Airbnb in the new year? Let’s break it down!

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to building a UX portfolio that will attract the relevant hiring managers. You will have to create a curated UX resume, LinkedIn profile, and UX portfolio with relevant UX skillsets and industry expertise.

So how do you start to curate the right UX portfolio to get hired at a brand like Airbnb?

• Get clear on 1-2 specific UX career paths you would like to showcase expertise in. Do NOT pursue 3 or 4 or 5 different career paths all at once! This will just confuse any recruiter or hiring manager looking at your profile. You can take our 2-minute personality quiz on what UX career path best suits you here.

• Get clear on what transferable skillsets and industry expertise you bring from past careers or educational experience. For folks who have 2-10 years of experience in another career path like education, healthcare, graphic design, or business strategy, it might be possible to rebrand as a mid-senior level UX researcher or UX designer, if you take the time to describe your transferable skillsets as service design. Of course, you will also have to address certain knowledge gaps!

• Get clear on what your knowledge gaps are that are blocking you from landing your dream UX role. Get focused on very specific knowledge gaps you will need to address if you want to pivot into a UX research or UX design career path.

• Plan your UX career for 2027 by working through our interactive 2026 UX Career Planning workshop in FigJam. The exercises will help you gain clarity, focus and specificity, helping you define and build a very specific UX portfolio suited to what YOU want. You can also work through our 2026 UX Design Hackathon to plan your UX portfolio once you have gained some clarity.

• Once you feel ready to build 3-5 UX case studies within a very specific, focused UX portfolio that aligns with your past career, service design, and your future direction, I would recommend booking a 20-minute UX strategy call with me to see if UX Woman can help you get to where you want to be!

• During our 20-minute strategy call, we love to validate your UX portfolio plan and get to know about your past experiences, as well as your future vision. If we both feel like we are a good fit for working with each other, we can talk about next steps like registering for the Fall 2026 cohort of the 7-Month Live UX Design Accelerator by paying the $490 registration fee.

• Once registered for the Fall 2026 cohort, which begins on Sunday, September 20th from 3pm - 6pm ET, I will send you all the onboarding materials for the Live UX course. This will include calendar invites to each class, a tuition payment plan and options, the student syllabus, and an onboarding call before class starts where we finalize your UX Woman project topic.

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman

P.S. You can also subscribe to our advanced UX topics Substack to get access to our VIP entry-level UX jobs board, VIP remote UX jobs board, our Power without Permission playbook for women in UX & tech, our 90-day UX job search playbook, and our Delusional by Design playbook on creativity as a UX career changer.

Welcome back to UX Challenge #26 on the UX psychology behind everyday brands. I’m Samaya, your UX Woman and I help you land six-figure UX jobs, sharing my experiences working with brands like Disney+, Hulu, Marvel, Vanguard, and more.

So what do you do? If you ask users for the bare minimum during the onboarding (1 pic and a short bio), you might get more sign up completions, but the app begins to look like a copycat of Tinder for more casual dating…. which is not on brand with Hinge, a company that promotes intentional dating experiences.

If you require users to fill in more data to create intentional dating profiles, you’ll probably lose more users during the onboarding flow. Hick’s Law in UX states that the time to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.

My hypothesis? It’s probably best to create a balanced onboarding flow that filters out the unintentional daters on purpose. Let them go to Tinder! But this is something you’d have to collaborate with business, design, and product management teams at Hinge to really solve.

I’ve taught live UX courses for over 5 years and love it when my students land UX jobs and interviews with brands like Reddit, CVS, Nike, Google, GE, Capital One and more.

So my question to you is: what are you going to do TODAY if you want to be hired at a social media company like Hinge in the new year? Let’s break it down!

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to building a UX portfolio that will attract the relevant hiring managers. You will have to create a curated UX resume, LinkedIn profile, and UX portfolio with relevant UX skillsets and industry expertise.

So how do you start to curate the right UX portfolio to get hired at a brand like Hinge?

• Get clear on 1-2 specific UX career paths you would like to showcase expertise in. Do NOT pursue 3 or 4 or 5 different career paths all at once! This will just confuse any recruiter or hiring manager looking at your profile. You can take our 2-minute personality quiz on what UX career path best suits you here.

• Get clear on what transferable skillsets and industry expertise you bring from past careers or educational experience. For folks who have 2-10 years of experience in another career path like education, healthcare, graphic design, or business strategy, it might be possible to rebrand as a mid-senior level UX researcher or UX designer, if you take the time to describe your transferable skillsets as service design. Of course, you will also have to address certain knowledge gaps!

• Get clear on what your knowledge gaps are that are blocking you from landing your dream UX role. Get focused on very specific knowledge gaps you will need to address if you want to pivot into a UX research or UX design career path.

• Plan your UX career for 2027 by working through our interactive 2026 UX Career Planning workshop in FigJam. The exercises will help you gain clarity, focus and specificity, helping you define and build a very specific UX portfolio suited to what YOU want. You can also work through our 2026 UX Design Hackathon to plan your UX portfolio once you have gained some clarity.

• Once you feel ready to build 3-5 UX case studies within a very specific, focused UX portfolio that aligns with your past career, service design, and your future direction, I would recommend booking a 20-minute UX strategy call with me to see if UX Woman can help you get to where you want to be!

• During our 20-minute strategy call, we love to validate your UX portfolio plan and get to know about your past experiences, as well as your future vision. If we both feel like we are a good fit for working with each other, we can talk about next steps like registering for the Fall 2026 cohort of the 7-Month Live UX Design Accelerator by paying the $490 registration fee.

• Once registered for the Fall 2026 cohort, which begins on Sunday, September 20th from 3pm - 6pm ET, I will send you all the onboarding materials for the Live UX course. This will include calendar invites to each class, a tuition payment plan and options, the student syllabus, and an onboarding call before class starts where we finalize your UX Woman project topic.

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman

P.S. You can also subscribe to our advanced UX topics Substack to get access to our VIP entry-level UX jobs board, VIP remote UX jobs board, our Power without Permission playbook for women in UX & tech, our 90-day UX job search playbook, and our Delusional by Design playbook on creativity as a UX career changer.

Welcome back to UX Challenge #25 on the UX psychology behind everyday brands. I’m Samaya, your UX Woman and I help you land six-figure UX jobs, sharing my experiences working with brands like Disney+, Hulu, Marvel, Vanguard, and more :) So let’s get into it!

Will the FigmaMake AI agent be able to pick up on patterns in your low-fidelity concept ideas and come up with more options that you hadn’t considered?

Will the AI agent be able to provide 10 branding and styling options for your MVP because you’re having a hard time picking colors and fonts?

Could the AI agent take over the tedious work of creating and defining design system components while you focus on feature and product innovation and iteration?

Could the AI agent stitch up a prototype, leaving you to focus on leading stakeholder collaboration as the UX design expert in the room?

All AI design has these 5 elements in the UX workflow: (1) collecting human inputs, (2) verifying human inputs, (3) displaying AI outputs, (4) getting feedback from the human, and (5) editing the AI output.

#1. What are the user inputs that this tool will collect? Will the UX designers of the next generation create with written prompts, voice prompts, hand drawn sketches? Or a little bit of everything?

#2. How will AI synthesize human inputs and ask follow up questions to increase the certainty levels of the AI output or calculation?

#3. Will AI display multiple options and help users narrow down what they want? Or will they just display one answer with over 95% certainty?

#4. How will users give AI feedback? By drawing over their sketches? Or through voice or written prompts?

#5.How will AI respond to user feedback? Will it refine ideas based on feedback, providing multiple options or just one option with over 95% certainty? How collaborative will these interactions between human and AI be?

If you are interested in AI product design and 0-1 AI Product Innovation, I recommend watching a couple of our free YouTube lessons dedicated to this subject and evolving field!

• 0-1 AI Product Innovation

• Redesigning Netflix AI in 15 Minutes

• Redesigning Google Maps AI in 15 Minutes

• Redesigning Spotify AI in 15 Minutes

• Redesigning Hinge’s AI in 15 Minutes

When you register for our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator program ($7450), we get you access to our 0-1 AI Product Innovation online course with over 6+ hours of content on all things AI product design, AI design systems, AI design heuristics, and designing for AI-human interaction and handoffs of control or task management between human and AI.

I’m glad that there is a lot of emerging critique about AI, especially around the negative consequences of poor AI design, poor AI design standards, negative environmental effects, data privacy and content ownership concerns.

As UX designers, we have the unique job of coming to a compromise between user needs, business requirements, and tech constraints. If you are ready to come up with unique AI and UX design systems, I recommend registering for our Fall 2026 cohort by paying the $490 registration fee to save your seat.

• You can use our summer discount code UXDESIGN101 to get a $200 discount on the Fall 2026 course registration.

• Once registered, you will get access to our 0-1 AI Product Innovation course and VIP UX jobs board.

• I’ll book an onboarding call with you to help you work through your UX project topic for the program. If you are having trouble with planning your UX career, I recommend working through our 2026 UX Design Hackathon we hosted in May.

So, are you ready to take action on your UX career goals rather than just dreaming about them or planning them?

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman

P.S. You can also subscribe to our advanced UX topics Substack to get access to our VIP entry-level UX jobs board, VIP remote UX jobs board, our Power without Permission playbook for women in UX & tech, our 90-day UX job search playbook, and our Delusional by Design playbook on creativity as a UX career changer.

P.P.S. We already have a handful of folks registered for the Fall 2026 cohort. If you are ready to put your stake in the ground and start building with intention, I recommend registering for the Fall 2026 cohort TODAY to save your seat! And don’t be a stranger! You can use the summer discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on your registration.

P.P.P.S Dont be a stranger! Book a 20 minute strategy call to learn if this is even the right option for you in the first place.

Welcome back to Challenge #24 of UX Woman’s series on the UX psychology behind everyday brands. I’m Samaya, your UX Woman and I help you land six-figure UX jobs, sharing my experiences working with brands like Disney+, Hulu, Marvel, Vanguard, and more :)

Atomic design is a methodology coined by Brad Frost, describing the composition of design systems in UX. Frost draws inspiration from science– creating digital atoms, molecules, organisms, templates and pages to showcase the composition of a design system.

A famous example from his book is Instagram’s design system from its early days. Here atoms are the individual icons, buttons and images that go on to create molecules. Molecules are elements like the header and menu bar in Instagram’s newsfeed.

Organisms are all the elements that make up an Instagram post. The template here are all the atoms, molecules and organisms that make up the newsfeed layout itself. And finally the page is the template populated by actual user data and meta data.

Over time, Instagram’s design system has scaled to include features that add to the newsfeed (e.g, reels, stories, threads). In large corporations design systems scale to a global level, with multiple design teams employed to handle design changes to each feature within the system.

If you’d like a quick lesson on UX design systems, UX laws, heuristics and AI design systems, I recommend watching our 60-minute YouTube session on UX Building Blocks: UX Laws, Atomic Design and AI Design Made Simple.

In our 7-Month Live UX Design Accelerator, we focus on building design systems for startup project topics, so that students learn more advanced level topics like product and feature scoping, product positioning, concept ideation, stakeholder management, design systems, AI design systems and more.

Consider this POV: You’re hired as the solo product designer at a stealth startup. What would you consider when building a design system for a startup product from scratch? Would you start with the branding, technical constraints, user problems, or monetization strategy? The answer is all of the above, but the order matters, so let’s break it down.

It’s important to start with user problems. Did you know that 40% of startups fail because nobody actually needed or wanted their product? If there is a need, then startups often get outcompeted by other bigger competitor players in the market. This will be true for AI startups and products as well in the age of AI. That’s why we spend the first 2 months in our Live UX cohorts focusing on UX research methods and business strategy to build a business model for the MVP solution we scope.

Next, design ideation and working closely with developers to work within technical constraints. What pie in the sky solutions can you design to solve tough user problems? And how might you simplify those solutions based on what’s technically and operationally feasible. During the first 2 months of the Live UX curriculum, we focus on product and feature scoping, considering 20-50 concepts and narrowing them down to 1 MVP solution based on both qualitative and quantitative data.

That brings me to the business perspective. There is no business without a clear monetization strategy or a solution that users are actually willing to pay for. So that is the next priority- a lot of startups try freemium models to get users hooked on using a product for a brief time before purchase. In our 7-Month Accelerator curriculum, our MVP scope clearly outlines free features and paid features, simple features and more advanced features that can drive monetization for the business.

And finally - branding and graphics! Surprised? But this is really just the cherry on top. Companies rebrand all the time. The key to building a successful design system is to focus on the substance, not the looks. When building design systems, our students focus on UX heuristics, atomic design, information architecture, and AI design to really build a solid foundation that’s scalable. That’s why they are easily able to evolve the design system for their MVP into more sophisticated versions of the product.

So, are you ready to learn how to build design systems from scratch? You can register for the Fall 2026 cohort by paying the $490 registration fee that saves your spot. You can pay the remainder of the tuition in either one lump sum, 7 monthly installments, or 4 monthly installments. Book a 20-minute UX strategy consult with us to see if this is even the right fit for you in the first place.

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman.

P.S. You can also subscribe to our advanced UX topics Substack to get access to our VIP entry-level UX jobs board, VIP remote UX jobs board, our Power without Permission playbook for women in UX & tech, our 90-day UX job search playbook, and our Delusional by Design playbook on creativity as a UX career changer.

P.P.S. We already have a handful of folks registered for the Fall 2026 cohort. If you are ready to put your stake in the ground and start building with intention, I recommend registering for the Fall 2026 cohort TODAY to save your seat! And don’t be a stranger! You can use the summer discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on your registration.

So, how might we redesign AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude for optimal usage? Are you over-reliant on AI or more averse to using it? Here’s why ALL AI users fall within this psychological spectrum, and what we can do about it as UX designers.

All AI users have 2 extreme biases around AI that falls on a spectrum. First there’s algorithm aversion and users who feel averse to using AI. These are the types of users who prefer to take a DIY approach rather than relying on AI tech. I definitely fall more on this side of the spectrum.

Then there’s algorithm over-reliance, or users who will use AI for anything and everything, even offloading critical thinking to the app. And I think that’s where Ronny’s critique becomes really relevant. Recent research studies also back up over-reliance in AI creating a loss in critical thinking overall.

I feel that users with both algorithm aversion or algorithm over-reliance have less productive or creative outcomes in comparison to users who tend to take on a more balanced approach. So what’s the balance and how can we as UX designers design for that balance?

When you register for our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator program ($7450), we get you access to our 0-1 AI Product Innovation online course with over 6+ hours of content on all things AI product design, AI design systems, AI design heuristics, and designing for AI-human interaction and handoffs of control or task management between human and AI.

I’m glad that there is a lot of emerging critique about AI, especially around the negative consequences of poor AI design, poor AI design standards, negative environmental effects, data privacy and content ownership concerns.

As UX designers, we have the unique job of coming to a compromise between user needs, business requirements, and tech constraints. If you are ready to come up with unique AI and UX design systems, I recommend registering for our Fall 2026 cohort by paying the $490 registration fee to save your seat.

• You can use our summer discount code UXDESIGN101 to get a $200 discount on the Fall 2026 course registration.

• Once registered, you will get access to our 0-1 AI Product Innovation course and VIP UX jobs board.

• I’ll book an onboarding call with you to help you work through your UX project topic for the program. If you are having trouble with planning your UX career, I recommend working through our 2026 UX Design Hackathon we hosted in May.

• I’ll send you calendar invites to the classes in late August/early September, along with reminders on tuition plan payments. You can pay the remainder of the tuition plan in either one lump sum, a 7-month installment plan, or a 4-month installment plan. There’s an additional $500 discount provided for folks who can pay the tuition price in one lump sum.

So, are you ready to take action on your UX career goals rather than just dreaming about them or planning them?

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman

P.S. You can also subscribe to our advanced UX topics Substack to get access to our VIP entry-level UX jobs board, VIP remote UX jobs board, our Power without Permission playbook for women in UX & tech, our 90-day UX job search playbook, and our Delusional by Design playbook on creativity as a UX career changer.

P.P.S. We already have a handful of folks registered for the Fall 2026 cohort. If you are ready to put your stake in the ground and start building with intention, I recommend registering for the Fall 2026 cohort TODAY to save your seat! And don’t be a stranger! You can use the summer discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on your registration.

First things first– should you ask open-ended questions, reflective questions, “why” questions or yes-no ones in your next UX research interview? Each type triggers a different psychological response, so let’s break it down.

Open ended questions and reflective questions help participants express themselves deeply by telling emotional stories. Questions like: “What did you do this morning?” Or “What happened?” or “If you could go back in time, what would you change?”

A UX researcher or undercover FBI agent typically asks open-ended questions to get people talking and uncover stories, motivations, and experiences. These questions help you unpack the full picture around the bigger “why” someone acts or feels the way they do.

“Why” questions tend to be too theoretical to answer for users, so we tend to rephrase these as “what” or “how” questions to get them to focus on their reality. Examples of why questions that are hard to answer are “Why did you do that?” That type of question could trigger some defensiveness. Instead try “what prompted you to do that?” It’s more approachable.

Yes-no questions are not great for UX research interviews, since they elicit binary responses without much context and can also be considered as “leading” questions. Examples include: “Do you believe that…” or “Would you say that…”

These style of questions are popular in interrogations. A professional dominatrix or prosecutor may ask more direct yes-or-no questions to guide the conversation toward a specific outcome.

Different questions create different outcomes. And that’s why asking questions is one of the most underrated skills in UX. The way you ask questions can influence research findings, stakeholder decisions, salary negotiations, client conversations, and even workplace power dynamics.

Our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator ($7450) helps you master UX storytelling, stakeholder management, and UX salary negotiations to help you land a six-figure UX job— all by mastering the power of asking a question. How?

• Create psychological safety during user interviews and stakeholder interviews, building trust and rapport across users and teams.

• Ask questions to gather context and unpack objections when faced with pushback from client teams or stakeholder teams around your UX design recommendations.

• Ask questions to challenge existing norms and push teams to come up with new approaches and perspectives during stakeholder ideation sessions.

• Ask process-oriented questions to understand blockers and accelerators towards getting what you want at work, such as a promotion or salary raise.

Over time, practicing these skillsets will help you morph into senior and leadership level roles, transitioning from being a junior UX designer or researcher on a team to landing a UX Director or VP of Design role. Over time, you will develop senior-level and leadership skillsets like:

• Managing client and stakeholder team relationships: Over time, you will establish good relationships with team leads and managers within client and stakeholder teams, building trust in your decision-making and unique approach to handling project work.

• Scoping new client work or stakeholder team collaborations: As you build trust and strengthen relationships and partnerships, clients and stakeholder teams alike will approach you when they need your input, perspective or help. They trust you to help them create a balanced approach to tackling what needs to be tackled.

• Leading change management internally in an organization: As you establish great relationships at work, stakeholders and leaders alike will trust you to take on bigger risks and deliver larger impact and returns. Your established track record will help them take the leap when it comes to bigger initiatives they might once have been hesitant about.

• Establishing UX design’s influence on the business: With a proven track record, you have gradually built a work culture where design has a seat at the business table and influences the direction of the business.

In our first class within the 7-Month UX Design Accelerator, we showcase design thinking case studies across startup, consulting, and corporate use cases looking at brands like Airbnb, IDEO, and Pepsi Co. Our cohort members learn from Day 1 that business and design cannot be separated. They always complement each other.

So, what are you waiting for? You can register for the Fall 2026 cohort by paying the $490 registration fee that saves your spot. You can pay the remainder of the tuition in either one lump sum, 7 monthly installments, or 4 monthly installments. Book a 20-minute UX strategy consult with us to see if this is even the right fit for you in the first place.

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman.

P.S. You can also subscribe to our advanced UX topics Substack to get access to our VIP entry-level UX jobs board, VIP remote UX jobs board, our Power without Permission playbook for women in UX & tech, our 90-day UX job search playbook, and our Delusional by Design playbook on creativity as a UX career changer.

P.P.S. We already have a handful of folks registered for the Fall 2026 cohort. If you are ready to put your stake in the ground and start building with intention, I recommend registering for the Fall 2026 cohort TODAY to save your seat! And don’t be a stranger! You can use the summer discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on your registration.

I once worked with a UX career changer in our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator program who LOVED everything about Duolingo. She’d worked for over 10 years as an educator, helping professionals learn advanced and conversational English. She studied what Duolingo did well and dreamed of working for them.

As she worked through her unique project topic in our UX Accelerator around learning advanced language skills, she solved for the problems and emotions around advanced language learning. She created gamified improv exercises for tough advanced level conversations in a foreign language.

As she worked through her project, she realized she enjoyed challenging how Duolingo did things rather than simply working for them. She’s now looking into creating her own language learning platform, reinventing how language learning is taught by combining her UX expertise with her English education expertise. Maybe her ideas will be acquired by Duolingo one day!

So how will you disrupt your favorite app? What’s a company that you love and how can you attract hiring managers from that company by completely changing the way they think?

It’s important to build a UX portfolio that reflects your values, beliefs and interests. You are essentially creating a personal brand and product-izing your unique approach to design thinking, problem solving, generating solutions, and ideating.

So how do you create a unique personal brand within your UX portfolio? It’s by making bold decisions based on what you truly want. What do you want? What specific UX career path makes the most sense for you? What 1-2 industries can you showcase expertise in? Get specific! Your specificity is your differentiator, helping you stand out from the crowd.

What transferable skills into UX did you take away from past work or educational experience? How can you rebrand your past experiences to highlight their value within a UX career path? What are ways you can highlight your unique perspective by showing how you saved cost, time, and resources by optimizing company processes from past roles?

And most importantly, what are you going to do every day and every week to start taking action on your UX career goals? What knowledge gaps do you need to address? What are ways you are going to invest in yourself to achieve the UX career success you are looking for? What active decisions and choices are you going to make?

How are you going to hold yourself accountable to working on these UX career goals? I love working with our student cohorts in our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator Program ($7450 early bird tuition, register by Thursday, September 10 to commit to the Fall 2026 cohort) to create a personalized UX blueprint for themselves before they even start the program! This helps each of our cohort members stand out from the crowd to land their dream UX job. Book a 20-minute UX career consult if you have questions about the course.

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman.

P.S. You can also subscribe to our advanced UX topics Substack to get access to our VIP entry-level UX jobs board, VIP remote UX jobs board, our Power without Permission playbook for women in UX & tech, our 90-day UX job search playbook, and our Delusional by Design playbook on creativity as a UX career changer.

P.P.S. We’ve had a chance to speak to a lot of incredibly talented folks who are eager to start building up a strong UX portfolio for the next hiring season. If you are ready to put your stake in the ground and start building with intention, I recommend registering for the Fall 2026 cohort TODAY to save your seat! And don’t be a stranger! Book a call with us to talk through things…

Netflix started by expanding to other English-speaking countries like Canada and the UK, partnering with local studios to tell stories that were relevant to that locale. Based on their learnings with scaling to other English-speaking countries, they started scaling to Spanish speaking countries as well, mastering the art of co-creating with local studios and storytellers to create relevant content for each locale. The core of inclusive design is always co-creation, rather than solely focusing on one design team’s or one leader’s genius.

Their co-creative operational processes helped them create a global empire in just 7 years. Next, Netflix created a global distribution system online via their platform so that storytellers and entertainment studios from around the world would want to work with them!

What made them so successful during an economic crisis? They were able to spot patterns and opportunities that nobody else could see. They created something no other company had even considered to create before.

And that’s exactly how UX designers, creatives and entrepreneurs survive economic crises. We spot the opportunities before they even exist. Recently I’ve been getting a lot of questions from folks within our UX community around fears with the current state of tech and the economy:

• How will UX designers survive the age of AI?

• What can we do to stay relevant in a hyper competitive job market?

• What are ways to recover from constant rounds of tech layoffs?

These are all real concerns and deserve careful consideration. Here are my answers:

As designers, we can’t fear AI if we are going to be the ones guiding the future of AI design. We already have AI algorithms created by brands like Netflix, Spotify, and Meta dominating how content is curated behind the scenes. And in 2026 and beyond, hundreds of AI products will be released— both good ones and bad ones, successful ones and failures. It’s our job as UX designers and product designers to design ethically for AI-human interaction, how humans provide AI with inputs, how AI churns out outputs, how AI edits outputs based on human feedback. We cover AI product design within our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator. Our cohort members go on to design AI products and features with confidence and add AI Product Design as part of their expertise that they can include in their UX portfolios. Currently we have a Spring 2026 cohort member creating an AI note-taking app for healthcare professionals looking to hand-off patient care in between shifts! One of our Spring 2025 cohort members created an AI recommendation tool for e-commerce athleisure wear.

It’s important to highlight 3-5 UX case studies in your UX portfolio that showcase your unique way of thinking– how you innovate within the design process. This is also what helps you recover fast after rounds of layoffs over the years. Our alumni have landed six-figure UX jobs and quickly recovered after layoffs with our system to showcase their unique expertise, skillsets, transferable skills, and ways of innovating:

• They rebrand past career paths to highlight transferable skillsets and service design. I’ve worked with folks who rebrand ten years of education or healthcare expertise into UX for ed-tech or health-tech. If you are wondering what your transferable skillsets into UX are, I recommend watching our YouTube lesson on Service Design for Creatives Who Think in Systems. I also recommend going through our interactive FigJam around 2026 UX Career Planning.

• They focus on 1-2 industries to highlight expertise within their UX portfolio. The best UX portfolios showcase a clear focus in 1-2 specific UX career paths and 1-2 specific industries. This shows depth over superficiality, industry expertise over a generalist approach. The more specific you get, the more you are truly noticed by hiring managers and recruiters. UX career changers and new grads alike always make the mistake of trying to appeal to anyone and everyone…and they end up landing no interviews because there is often not much interest in a UX generalist or a jack of all trades. In today’s world AI is the generalist. People are hired for their specific and unique expertise. Watch our YouTube Lesson on 22 Tips to Pivot into UX- No Degree Required and The State of UX in 2026 to get a leg up when it comes to the UX job search.

• They present unique UX case studies on innovative problems in an industry space that have not yet been solved or considered. They highlight unique perspectives and solve problems that the mainstream industry hasn’t yet fully understood– this is what helps their UX case studies stand out from the crowd. In the past, our alumni have focused on creating a fintech app for addicts in recovery, an e-commerce thrift store experience for non-binary shoppers, an AI fit expert for women looking for fashionable athleisure clothing, and an app for AAPI creators and film makers to share cultural content with fans and audiences. These are all BOLD and unique perspectives that solve unsolved problems for invisible communities and untapped markets.

So are you ready to get more innovative when planning your UX portfolio?

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman.

P.S. You can also subscribe to our advanced UX topics Substack to get access to our VIP entry-level UX jobs board, VIP remote UX jobs board, our Power without Permission playbook for women in UX & tech, our 90-day UX job search playbook, and our Delusional by Design playbook on creativity as a UX career changer.

P.P.S. We’ve had a chance to speak to a lot of incredibly talented folks who are eager to start building up a strong UX portfolio for the next hiring season. If you are ready to put your stake in the ground and start building with intention, I recommend registering for the Fall 2026 cohort TODAY to save your seat! And don’t be a stranger! Book a call with us to talk through things…