AI and the UX Design Reckoning

Four years ago, deep in the early throes of the coronavirus lockdown, I wrote a piece titled “The Creative Destruction of Creatives.” My dour mood stemmed partly from the grim layoff news, which hit creatives particularly hard. But there was something more in the air, a whiff of desperation that things were changing in design, and changing fast. In retrospect, the article foreshadowed and amplified the continued headwinds creatives face today.

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At the time, my focus was on the fragility of creatives, especially designers whose raison d’etre was innovation and design for people. I sensed something was changing in tech that went far beyond the market downturn. These creatives and entire design departments were the first to be deemed “non-essential” workers. To many, creatives were inconsequential in a time when basic necessities were in short supply.

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This perception of design as a nice-to-have held steady for a while, with a few U-turns around the possibilities of remote work. Then came two forces that compounded the problem even further. The first was the end of ZIRP (zero interest rate policy), a time of cheap capital that fueled so much of the investments and growth over the past decades. This was followed by the rapid rise of GenAI (a fusion of big data, GPU innovation, and artificial neural networks), a disruptive technology that animates design’s current milieu. It made everyone reassess the direction of technology and our very concept of what user experience could be. Where once a slick UX, such as an onboarding experience, would move the needle, now people’s expectations began to leapfrog even the wildest imaginations of design visionaries.

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I remember vividly starting an engagement with a well-known tech client when ChatGPT 3.0 launched. The entire leadership and executive team took notice right away, and everything we were asked to work on pivoted overnight. That’s the power and potential of AI. And unlike the dotcom boom, this transformation doesn’t feel like a bubble but rather a continuum of a desire for computers to be smarter, better, and faster to improve the lives of people.

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The world was changing, and creatives were on the sidelines, left to watch the creative destruction unfold – you don’t need creatives if there’s nothing to create. The front-end was taking a back seat to the back-end.

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At the time of COVID, my suggestion for designers was to take this opportunity to practice the 3Rs: to reset, reconnect, and refresh their toolkit. For designers, who are mostly introverts, this was a tall order. And for design leaders, who were mostly riding the wave of design thinking and working their executive muscle, this proved daunting.

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The 3Rs was an attempt to acknowledge that the industry we’ve been in for years was changing rapidly. It was also a call to reconnect with others and, in return, to better understand ourselves and the world. The final R (to refresh) was aimed at diversifying our skill sets while finding areas where we could add value. This very notion of business value is a pragmatic one, which looks a lot like specialization. It also meant being a lot less polemic and more business-minded, less design thinking, and more design doing. For a field filled with generalists, this too proved challenging.

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With the end of ZIRP and the boom in AI, tech has moved into a new phase, one where innovation is driven primarily by monetization and technical muscle. In its wake, how something looks is less important than how it works. That shift in the short term doesn’t leave much room for customer insights, design strategy, and research – typically the foundation of new product development.

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For example, the creator of ChatGPT was not someone using Figma; rather, it was a sole engineer, Alec Radford, working off in a corner of OpenAI to develop it in 2018 and 2019. While this may be an exception, I’ve also run into successful startups with no designers at all. They consist of product managers, founders, and engineers using an existing UI framework to build and launch products in search of their product market fit (PMF).

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Operating on Hope

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The state of design today is at an inflection point. In some ways, design and design thinking have been wildly successful and achieved many of their goals. Everywhere, we see companies hiring Chief Design Officers, deploying design systems, best practices, and standards in a fairly uniform and usable way. Things have matured to the point where novel designs are no longer needed.

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We’re seeing more of the designer’s job operationalized, with design ops practitioners defining the creative process and design leaders fighting to regain their voice with executives. The tech world has moved on from the hopeful view of designers as visionaries in the mold of Steve Jobs to the more pragmatic operative of Tim Cook. Product development is also being reduced to operational efficiency and monetization. Creativity still has its place, but it’s not clear what that looks like in the age of a very non-human AI world.

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We’re also seeing the “Amazon Effect” of design. Amazon has shown that aesthetics are not a high priority. It has shown that you can be a hugely successful online business with minimal care for design and rely almost solely on data to make design decisions. The irony is that for Amazon, the customer experience is everything, from the pricing, availability, speed, and service. But in their world, what enables the experience is the back-end and back-office, with the front-end serving merely as its expression.

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The Amazon app is not beautiful by any stretch, but it works. The app is designed to get you what you want, when you want it. That’s less about design and more about logistics. In some ways, the entire organization is set up to maximize their operational efficiency, with design ops as a subset of that.

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The next phase of creativity is one that will be shaped by how well we humanize AI to solve intractable problems, simplify our lives, while also enriching it. This is not solely a technology problem, or a design problem, or a business problem. It will require collaboration like we’ve never seen before, from different disciplines, to ensure we don’t veer off that vision. As Pope Francis reminds us, “Artificial intelligence, robotics, and other technological innovations must be so employed that they contribute to the service of humanity and to the protection of our common home, rather than to the contrary, as some assessments unfortunately foresee."

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