UX Lift roundup – the best UX articles and tools from the last few weeks

Happy new year!

I hope you’re having a great 2025 so far and thanks so much for being a subscriber, your support means a lot.

I’ve just relaunched the UX Lift website with a new design, more features and much better tagging and organisation, something I’ve been meaning to do for ages. Please do take a look, I’d love to hear what you think.

New stuff includes:

• Over 5500 UX articles and tools, now nicely summarised and tagged.

• Search the article database and get answers to your UX questions.

• Choose the topics you’re interested in to create a custom newsfeed.

• Submit articles and tools you’ve created or found useful.

Articles

Designing for decision making – Applying the psychology of choice to UX design.

Against the dark forest – Hopeful counter to the idea of the internet becoming a howling wasteland of AI & bots, while humans huddle in digital bunkers. Worth reading just for the phrase ‘dipshit accelerator’.

8 excellent user research emails – Handy ideas for recruiting user research participants.

Don’t forget to localise your icons – Icons might not mean what you expect in other languages.

2025 list of UX + AI design conferences – Handy list of dates for your calendar.

Alt text: what to write – How to effectively write alt text for images to enhance web accessibility, detailing when to use it based on image type and context.

The biggest challenges practitioners encounter working in UX – A survey of 126 UX practitioners reveals five challenges: inaccurate perception of UX, lack of measurable impact, insufficient resources, depleted job market and minimal stakeholder buy-in.

Alt text: not always needed – Guidelines for using alt text in images, stressing the need for clear descriptions based on context, rather than simply visual details.

Cool tools

Inclusive mindset workbook - Figma template to help you be a more inclusive designer.

Sill – See what people are sharing on Bluesky and Mastodon.

Pie Menu – Nifty shortcut widget app for Mac.

Feedback.one – Simple, free user feedback tool for your website.

Baymard best practice cards – Figma plugin to add Baymard best practice cards to reinforce your design decisions and manage stakeholder feedback

Cool stuff

Stimulation Clicker – Realised I’d spent over 15 minutes clicking when I should have been researching links for this newsletter. Evil and genius.

DOOM: The Gallery Experience – Sip wine and view art in the classic 3D shooter.

IMG_001 – Youtube videos with default filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.

MementoMovi – Enter your birthdate and choose a film to see your progress.

SwearSky – All the swears posted to Bluesky read out in real-time. Also, here’s the firehose rendered in 3D.

Times New Dumbass – Font inspired by the world’s most divorced man.

Draw.audio – Draw patterns and listen to them. Bleepy.