👋🏼 Smashing Friends,
In complex products, many design choices are heavily constrained by the huge volume of data, features, customization and domain complexity that they have to match. There might be 100s of filters, with dependencies, nested modals, nested tables and overcrowded dropdowns.
Let's explore these issues in this newsletter! And if you’d like to dive deeper, meet our upcoming free live 1.5h workshop on 🚀 Designing Complex UIs in the Age of AI with yours truly, Vitaly Friedman. Only 1000 seats. Save your spot.
Meet SmashingConf Antwerp 2026: for product designers and UI engineers.
Design and UX are also at the heart of our upcoming SmashingConf Antwerp 2026 later this year. There has never been a better time to join in with your team — and save 35% off for friendly teams. Jump to the topics →
I hope you have a truly fantastic, productive, and preferably stable rest of the week, everyone!
— Vitaly
1. Alternatives To Nested Modals
Nested modals are common in complex products, but there are better ways to tackle the UX challenges they are trying to solve. Joseph Mueller looks into the root problems of nested modals and suggests alternative patterns you can use instead to help users move seamlessly through your product.
2. Better Nested Tables
“Nested tables aren’t the enemy. Careless nesting is,” argues Damilola Bamgbelu. To help you design tables that show parent and child data together, without overwhelming users, she wrote a practical step-by-step guide. It explores all the fine little details of displaying complex data to support scanning and enable fast decisions.
3. Designing For Complex UIs
Complex UIs don’t have to be complicated. If you’re up for a deep dive into designing complex interfaces, be sure to tune into the free Maven lesson that Vitaly gave on the topic. From navigation and search to tables and forms, it explores patterns and best practices you can apply to your work right away. You’ll find all slides and further resources in the accompanying Google Doc.
From our sponsor
Can’t Keep Up With A Growing Accessibility Backlog? Here’s How To Move Forward.
When accessibility issues pile up faster than teams can resolve them, launches slip. Tune into our on-demand webinar for practical strategies you can use to speed up fixes and prevent regression. Plus, explore frameworks for embedding accessibility into design and development workflows to stop issues at the source.
4. Six Layers Of AI Experience
With generative AI making its way into digital products, design is more important than ever. Emily Campbell wrote a comprehensive guide to AI UX in which she explores the six layers of AI experience and how the new challenges and opportunities impact not only design but also the role of designers. A must-read.
5. Lists Vs. Tables Vs. Data Grids
List, table, or data grid? Which one should you pick? Oracle’s Redwood design system compares all three of them to help you choose the best component based on your user tasks and the features you wish to include. For a quick overview, it also showcases dos and don’ts that illustrate how well the different components handle different use cases.
6. Nudges And Biases In The Age Of AI
Heuristics, biases, and nudges help us better understand human reasoning. Now, in the age of AI, things are starting to shift, and systems produce the first move in every decision. What does that mean for the behavioral science concepts we have been relying on for so long? Sudha Broslawsky created Nudges.fyi to help us figure out what the old shortcuts mean now and what new ones AI is quietly inventing.
From our sponsor
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SurveyJS is a product suite of open-source JavaScript client-side components designed to simplify the creation of a full-cycle form management system fully integrated in your IT infrastructure. The libraries utilize JSON objects for form metadata and results, and seamlessly integrate with any backend system. The JSON form builder component offers a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, GUI for form branching, and an integrated CSS theme editor for customizing form design. Check out its free full-featured demo to explore its capabilities firsthand.
7. Dropdown Pitfalls
Dropdowns seem like a straightforward choice when designing a form, but they bring along quite some pitfalls. So, how do we pick a better input method? And how can we improve the usability of dropdown inputs when there’s no other alternative? Josh Wayne explores these questions in a blog post to help us make select inputs hassle-free for users.
From our sponsor
Watch AI Prototyping In Action
ProtoPie AI turns a simple prompt into a fully interactive prototype with triggers, variables, and animations in minutes. Watch the recorded live demo and see it for yourself.
8. Accessible UX Research, Now Shipping 📚
We’ve got exciting news! Our newest Smashing book, Accessible UX Research by Michele A. Williams, is finally shipping worldwide! Get the book right away or order the eBook for instant download.
Meet our brand-new book: “Accessible UX Research” by Michele A. Williams. Printed copies shipping now.
Accessible UX Research is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Download a free sample (PDF, 2.3MB) or get the book right away.
9. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
With online workshops, we aim to give you the same experience and access to experts as in an in-person workshop from wherever you are.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
10. Person Of The Week: Are Halland
Please give a warm round of applause for our Person of the Week: Are Halland. Are has worked with digital product development, strategy, design, and communication for more than a quarter of a century. He is the creator of the Core Model and author of The Core Model: A Common Sense Approach to Digital Strategy and Design.
As an independent coach, speaker, facilitator, and consultant, Are helps people implement the Core Model methodology effectively. He also does in-house training and open courses on digital strategy and user-centered design.
Thank you for everything you do for the community, dear Are! 🧡
11. Recent Smashing Articles
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Cosima Mielke, Vitaly Friedman, and Iris Lješnjanin.
Sent to truly smashing readers via Mailchimp.
We sincerely appreciate your kind support. You rock.
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