Latest news with #UXdesign
Globe and Mail
07-08-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Digital Silk Delivers Custom Booking Engine and Enhanced UX for Vacation Homes of Key West
Miami, Florida--(Newsfile Corp. - August 7, 2025) - Digital Silk, an award-winning web development agency focused on creating brand strategies, custom websites, and digital marketing campaigns, has announced the launch of a new digital platform for Vacation Homes of Key West. The redesigned website includes a custom-built booking engine and advanced UX features to support seamless vacation rental browsing and reservations. Website redesign for seamless bookings and smarter user engagement. To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: New Web Experience Aims to Support Conversions and Mobile Usability Vacation Homes of Key West, a boutique vacation rental company with over 40 properties, required a website that could accommodate frequent inventory updates and deliver a consistent user experience across devices. The new platform offers real-time availability syncing, customized search filters, and a streamlined reservation process tailored to customer needs. Digital Silk's team developed the solution in collaboration with the client, applying UX strategies designed to potentially improve usability and retention. The platform also includes automated syncs with external travel sites, eliminating manual updates and ensuring consistent listing accuracy. "A smooth digital experience is critical for vacation rental decisions," said Gabriel Shaoolian, CEO of Digital Silk. "This project focused on creating a branded platform that aligns with user expectations and business operations." Website Features Designed to Meet Business Objectives The redesigned website includes: A custom booking engine with real-time availability sync Mobile-optimized search and filter features UX strategy for simplified browsing and conversions Integrated CMS for inventory control and calendar updates ADA-accessibility improvements According to a 2024 Skift report, 70% of U.S. travelers prefer booking vacation rentals directly through the provider's site when functionality and ease of use meet expectations. Digital Silk's redesign aims to support this preference by delivering a cohesive and intuitive digital experience. About Digital Silk Digital Silk is an award-winning Miami Web Development Agency focused on growing brands online. With a team of seasoned experts, Digital Silk creates digital experiences through strategic branding, custom web design, and digital marketing services to help improve visibility and support engagement.
Forbes
25-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Enterprise AI Isn't A Feature—It's A New UX Paradigm
Gopikrishnan Anilkumar is a Principal Product Manager at Amazon, where he leads product management for multiple AI products and services. The rise of generative AI is creating a powerful shift in enterprise technology. From customer support to analytics, organizations are integrating AI into critical workflows, expecting it to enhance productivity, automate repetitive work and drive strategic decision making. But although the technology has matured rapidly, the user experience (UX) layer (i.e., how users interact with and trust these systems) often lags behind. Too many AI-powered enterprise tools fall short not because of model limitations but because they misunderstand how users work, decide and trust. Generative AI isn't just a back-end engine. It represents an entirely new kind of interaction. Designing for it requires rethinking user experience from the ground up. AI Isn't A Button—It's A Behavioral Shift In most AI implementations, product teams treat intelligence as a bolt-on feature, like a button that triggers a model or a prompt box that feeds into a text generation service. But generative AI introduces uncertainty, autonomy and fluidity. It doesn't just return results, as it even participates in decisions. This requires a shift from static feature design to behavioral design. AI systems should be context-aware, act only when useful and adapt to user preferences. In regulated environments, even more care is needed. Each action must be auditable, suggestions explainable and the AI must know when to step back. Prompting Isn't A Scalable UX Pattern Many enterprise tools built around large language models (LLMs) assume users will communicate with AI via typed prompts. Although this may work for developers and early adopters, it's rarely intuitive for business users. Professionals in healthcare, finance or operations don't have time to construct ideal prompts. They want accurate outcomes based on minimal input. Effective AI UX provides structured interactions: smart defaults, fill-in-the-blank suggestions, clickable intents and domain-specific controls. These reduce the friction between user need and AI action. Trust Is A UX Outcome, Not Just A Technical Goal Trust in AI is often discussed as a matter of model quality or data governance. Although these are critical, trust is also a function of how the system presents itself to the user. A confident answer without evidence can erode trust. A transparent answer with sources, confidence scores and options for review builds it. Good UX makes uncertainty visible. It gives users the tools to verify claims, retrace logic and even reject an answer when appropriate. In this way, trust becomes an experience outcome, not just a back-end aspiration. For example, an AI assistant may show which documents were retrieved from a knowledge base to generate an answer, cite time stamps and internal sources, indicate confidence levels with visual cues, and offer a fallback when the model is unsure or the input is ambiguous. These elements transform AI from a black box to a trustworthy product. Enterprise Context Demands Systems Thinking Enterprise workflows are complex. They span systems, roles, data policies and compliance boundaries. A generative model may provide a correct answer in isolation but fail when deployed in a broader system that requires traceability, authorization or multistep context. To realize AI's full promise, product leaders must move away from "feature thinking" (the idea that AI is just another button or tab). Instead, they must embrace "system thinking"—designing AI as an intelligent, adaptive layer that spans data, logic, UX and decision making. This means designing: • With human-in-the-loop interactions, not blind automation • For progressive disclosure, not information overload • With fail-safes and fallbacks, not brittle dependencies • For explainability and auditability, not just speed Conclusion The next generation of successful enterprise AI tools won't be defined by how advanced their models are. They'll be defined by how well they integrate into human workflows with clarity, control and credibility. As product and technology leaders, our responsibility isn't just to deploy powerful models but to ensure they are usable, understandable and trustworthy. That starts with UX. Generative AI isn't a feature to layer on top of legacy interfaces. It's a paradigm shift in how enterprise software behaves. The sooner we embrace this, the faster we'll build systems that truly empower the people who use them. Disclaimer: The opinions in this article are those of Gopikrishnan Anilkumar and not representative of any organizations he has worked for. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
Fast Company
23-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
UX and product designers start with the same salaries. They end up miles apart
UX designers and product designers have very similar jobs. They both arrange digital parts. They both use Figma more than other designers do. And, according to a recent Fast Company analysis of design job listings, they start out with pretty much the same entry-level salary, around $70,000 a year. But as their careers progress, those salaries diverge. Among job postings asking that a candidate have between four and five years of experience, the average salary offered for UX designers was about $123,720, while the salary for product designers was $149,850. By the time these types of designers reach more developed stages of their careers, requiring at least eight years of experience, UX designers are offered an average of about $153,920, while product designers can earn $197,579. That's about 28% more for product designers. UX design vs. product design To understand what might be driving the discrepancy in salary between UX and product designers over the course of their careers, it is helpful to look at differences in the actual duties that each type of worker performs, and how their careers typically progress. A UX designer is responsible for the feel and flow of a product, e.g. the user experience, while a product designer oversees both visual elements of an app or website and what types of features it should even have to begin with. Alexander Benz, a UX designer, product manager, and CEO of Blikket, a design and development agency for DTC brands, explains that people who start out as UX designers tend to go on become UX managers, involved in the production of a product's design system, or they become other kinds designers. But as product designers develop in their careers, they begin branching out into other parts of the business, interfacing with stakeholders from across the organization. Subscribe to the Design latest innovations in design brought to you every weekday SIGN UP Privacy Policy | Fast Company Newsletters advertisement The final deadline for Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech Awards is Friday, June 20, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
Fast Company
16-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Where the design jobs are in 2025
BY Generative AI—and the velocity of its evolution—is forcing every breed of designer to contemplate a future without them. Will Midjourney and DALL-E eliminate the need for graphic designers? Will Claude and Gemini obviate the UX lead? What happens to motion artists in a world where Sora supposedly becomes the newest auteur? We're no sages. And we're certainly not clairvoyant. But we can comfortably say that, even if an AI-driven design industry apocalypse is coming, it hasn't arrived yet. Our second annual report on the state of the design industry draws from a dataset of 176,000 job listings we've gathered on Google Jobs (which consolidates listings from across the internet, including Indeed, LinkedIn, and regional job boards) from October 2023 to February 2025. They span several design disciplines: graphic, interior, game, urban, UX, product, and architectural. The clearest and perhaps most reassuring takeaway this year? Designers are still needed. Graphic and UX design job postings are flat from last year, game design postings are up, and urban design postings are way up. Only architects and product designers saw a dip, with postings for the latter down 24% from last year. So it's not time yet to abandon that art or architecture degree in order to become a prompt engineer.
