Smashing Magazine 🇺🇦 🏳️‍🌈

✨ In a rush to embrace AI, the industry is redefining what it means to be a UX designer, blurring the line between design and engineering. Carrie Webster explores what’s gained, what’s lost, and why designers need to remain the guardians of the user experience: smashingmagazine.com/2026/04/produc…

🌐 Poorly handled session timeouts are more than a technical inconvenience. They can become serious accessibility barriers that interrupt essential online tasks, especially for people with disabilities. Thoughtful session management improves usability and creates a more accessible, respectful web: smashingmagazine.com/2026/04/sessio…

Our Person of the Week specializes in UX design for medical devices, complex software, and embedded GUIs. Please give a warm round of applause for... Dennis Lenard! Thank you for everything you do for the community, dear Dennis! 🧡 #smashingcommunity

Our Person of the Week is passionate about creating symbols and experiences that connect us all, even when we don’t speak the same language. Drumroll, please, for... Yiying Lu! Thank you for everything you do for the community, dear @YiyingLu! 🧡 #smashingcommunity

🧩 Imagine you need to improve the UX of a decade-old legacy system. It’s slow, unreliable, and severely outdated — a sort of “black box” that everyone relies on but no one fully understands. There’s no single way to fix it, but there are ways to make progress while respecting the needs of users and stakeholders: smashingmagazine.com/2026/04/legacy…

Our Person of the Week is a security researcher and CSS enthusiast who builds things most people would think are impossible. Please give a warm round of applause for... Lyra Rebane! Thank you for everything you do for the community, dear @rebane2001! 🧡 #smashingcommunity

🎯 We often see design principles as rigid guidelines that dictate design decisions. In reality, they are an incredible tool for rallying teams around a shared purpose and capturing the values an organization embodies. But how do we choose the right ones?smashingmagazine.com/2026/04/practi…

Our Person of the Week is on a mission to help designers integrate awareness for risk, emotion, and unhappy paths into their processes. Drumroll, please, for... Emily Anderson! Thank you for everything you do for the community, dear Emily! 🧡 #smashingcommunity

🌐 Success in modern UX isn’t about having the most content. It’s about having the most findable content. Yet even with more data and better tools than ever, internal search often fails, leaving users to rely on global search engines to find a single page on a site. Why does the “Big Box” still win, and how can we bring users back?smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/site-s…

✨ Accessibility works best when it blends into everyday workflows — not a big transformation, but simple processes that stick. With Figma variables, testing font size increases becomes part of the design flow, making accessibility feel almost inevitable: smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/testin…

As we near the end of the month, our April wallpapers post is just around the corner. Would you like to get featured? There’s still one week left to submit your design! 🎨🖌️ Join in: smashingmagazine.com/2015/12/deskto…

Our Person of the Week is a Chief Design Officer, podcast host, and speaker passionate about building software that makes complexity less daunting. Drumroll, please, for... Chris Kolb! Thank you for everything you do for the community, dear @eightslashnine! #smashingcommunity

🧩 Dropdowns often work perfectly until they’re placed inside a scrollable panel, where they can get clipped, and half the menu disappears behind the container’s edge. ↬ Godstime Aburu explains why this happens and offers practical solutions to fix it: smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/dropdo…

✨ You’ve probably been there before. How do you choose between showing a modal to users and navigating them to a separate, new page? And does it even matter? smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/modal-…

Design isn’t only pixels and patterns. It’s pacing and feelings, too. 🎬⚡ ↬ Alan Cohen explores Emotion in Flow vs. Emotion in Conflict, showing how anime like Dan Da Dan and superhero films like James Gunn’s Superman manage emotional shifts and what product design can learn from them: smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/anime-…

Our Person of the Week is a creative director, writer, and artist passionate about creating expressive and performant responsive experiences. Drumroll, please, for... Tyler Sticka! Thank you for everything you do for the community, dear @tylersticka! 🧡 #smashingcommunity

⏱️ Almost any kind of application written in JavaScript works with dates or times in some capacity. Initially, this was limited to the built-in Date API, then Moment.js, and now the new Temporal standard has landed. @joeattardi shares practical “recipes” for migrating Moment-based code to the new Temporal API: smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/moving…

✨ Once upon a time, rounded corners meant five background images. Then border-radius arrived. Now, the corner-shape property takes CSS corners one step further, opening the door to beveled, scooped, and squircle corners: smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/beyond…

Some forms stay UI. Others quietly become rule engines. 🎨⚙️ Why do these two approaches exist? And how do you choose between them? smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/buildi… (Article supported by @SurveyJS 💖)

🧩 Many product teams still lean on usability improvements and isolated behavioral tweaks to address weak activation, drop-offs, and low retention – only to see results plateau or slip into shallow gamification. ↬ A decade later, @toxboe revisits persuasive design, clarifying what still holds up and how modern frameworks can guide both discovery and ideation: smashingmagazine.com/2026/03/persua…