Historically companies I've been at have had someone on staff, but we're a small startup and looking to get some UX/UI support. All of my googling has lead me to "gig" websites like Upwork or Fiver and talking to friends in industry (granted salaried UX/UI folks) have lead me to Linkedin or Indeed. Neither feels like the right place for what we're looking for. Does anyone have an suggestions for finding freelance designers we could work with iteratively? Thanks!

Context: Our company is rolling our a new platform out to beta users and are looking to refine some of our platform's interface. Mainly we're hoping to polish up some of the more amateur design elements across the platform and get help designing layout for tools/data presentation. We have done a good amount customer research on what folks are looking for, will be getting active feedback after pushing the changes, and are hoping to iterate with said feedback.

I have been a product designer and experience architect since before “UX” even meant anything.

I’ve never wanted for work, and I’ve always been confident in my skills as a leader both on the product and business strategy side.

But especially recently, I’ve started to feel some tremors I’ve never felt before:

1. A massive amount of young talent has flooded the industry via UX programs and boot camps - and much of them are quite talented!
2. Layoffs have further upped the available workers
3. AI and Automation have made good designers even more efficient, and even inexperienced designers can now move at the speed of light.

I also have some personal situations at play:

1. I took the last few years to launch and grow my own product business - scaling that eventually to an exit. So I’ve been out of the “product designer” game a bit - as I’ve been immersed in everything that comes with being a founder and startup growth.
2. I now have a family - I can’t grind as hard as I used to.

All this gives me some qualms about the ability to find work in the future.

With an industry now flooded in talent, and AI that commodifies and democratizes UI design - making it easier than ever to spit out good design - is there job security for product designers the next few years?

What does that look like? How will pay be affected? Where will the opportunity be?

This is a webpage for a courier company. This screengrab is the whole page as served to me. If I want to track my parcel I have to enter the details into the pretend phone on the right and pretend to use it like a phone, complete with tiny screen and fiddly controls.

I get that they would like me to install their app but this is almost offensively user-hostile design, and pretty much ensures I'll never install anything of the sort. I might consider installing the app of a company who deliver to me regularly and have a good track record of being good at their jobs, if that app offers useful functionality which can't be offered via a web page - but even that's unlikely. But these guys who I have never heard of until today and are pulling this nonsense? No way.

tl;dr What applications (web or desktop) have you seen that have excellent, productive user interfaces that prioritize getting shit done?

I am currently developing a moderately complex web application with a management interface that will be used by non-technical users. It also has a separate interface for technicians to see their tasks and submit reports, but I'm pretty happy with how that's coming together. I have a pretty good idea of how I want to display data in terms of what kind of "widgets" I could use. For example, a calendar view with daily, weekly, and monthly view modes. What I'm looking for inspiration with are the finer details, like filtering data, navigation, data hierarchy. I want to find things I hadn't even considered and aren't part of the typical "flat web UI toolkit" playbook.

I'd love to steal small ideas from a forgotten tool built for Windows 95, or maybe those paradigms are best left in the past—I don't know. Personally, I find most flat UI applications are almost useless in terms of discoverability, productivity, and general ease of use. Something like the Azure dashboard is what I would like to avoid building.

I'm also trying to keep my front end stack pretty lean by using Vue.js and rolling my own components based on accessible and keyboard navigable HTML components.