UI vs UX
UI is what the interface is made of. UX is what happens to the person using it. Confusing them produces beautiful products nobody can finish a task in.
Beginner6 min readVanshikaVanshika
Co-Founder & Design Education Lead, Navital Learning · Navital Labs
Vanshika is co-founder of Navital Learning and leads the design education track. She shapes not just what is taught, but how the platform itself works — decisions about structure, navigation, and how learning flows are informed by design thinking.
By day, she designs brand identity and product interfaces at Navital Labs. Her work covers the parts of a product a user actually meets: the type, the spacing, the colour, the order things appear in, and the small decisions that make a screen feel considered rather than assembled.
She writes the design curriculum here. Her lessons start from the question most beginners actually have — why does this look wrong? — and answer it with rules that can be applied the same afternoon, not with theory that only makes sense after a degree.
Her approach to design borrows from how people read and scan interfaces: what the eye reaches first, which contrasts register before anyone consciously looks, and which patterns a user already knows from every other product they've used. These are applied design principles, drawn from design practice and research literature, not clinical training.
LESSONS BY VANSHIKA
Why Does This UI Feel Wrong?
That vague sense that a screen is off is usually one of six specific, fixable problems. Here's how to name yours.
Beginner7 min readVanshikaVisual Hierarchy Explained
Hierarchy is deciding the order people see things in — and then making the screen enforce that order with size, weight, colour, and space.
Beginner7 min readVanshikaTypography Basics
Most of an interface is text. Getting size, spacing, line length, and contrast right fixes more than any font choice will.
Beginner7 min readVanshikaWhat Is a Design System?
A design system is a set of decisions made once, written down, and reused — so the tenth screen doesn't need the same arguments as the first.
Intermediate7 min readVanshikaColour Theory in Practice
Not the colour wheel. The four decisions that actually determine whether an interface's colour works: role, contrast, quantity, and consistency.
Beginner8 min readVanshikaAccessibility Basics for Designers
Most accessibility failures are design decisions, made early, cheap to avoid and expensive to retrofit. Here are the ones that matter.
Beginner8 min readVanshikaResponsive Design Principles
Designing one interface that works from a small phone to a wide monitor — by starting at the hard end and letting content decide the breakpoints.
Beginner7 min readVanshikaEmpty States and Error States
The screens nobody designs are the ones users meet first and at their most frustrated. Both are opportunities, and both are usually blank.
Beginner7 min readVanshikaForms That Work
Forms are where users give you something and where products lose them. Almost every rule that helps is about removing work, not adding polish.
Beginner7 min readVanshika