Continual rounds of layoffs, the emergence of advanced technology, and the proliferation of designers everywhere are forcing UX to question its reason for existence.

It's been a bad, horrible, rotten year for UX. With waves of designers laid off, UX’s influence diminished, and uncertainty about the role of advanced technology, the design community is left to some serious soul-searching. We are undoubtedly embarking on major changes to our role in making digital products. Understanding the driving factors behind these changes is key in helping us prepare for what UX might look like in the near future.

Technology is making the user’s experience ubiquitous

The past two decades have seen amazing advances in visual interfaces. In 2007, the first iPhone emerged and began the era of personal digital displays and applications. Now, almost twenty years later, we live in a world saturated by visual user interfaces. In this period of time, the profession of UX has emerged as an important contributor and provided a pretty nice career for many designers. However, emerging technology is driving a shift that will fundamentally impact what UX does.

For several years, major technology companies have been trying to push beyond the tired app-centric visual interfaces that have defined the past era. Virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant have had varying degrees of success, though adoption is driven more by their distribution network than actual use of the features. A struggle has always been their limited ability to understand and act on the user’s behalf.

The emergence of natural language processing now looks poised to put the verbal interface into the driver's seat. Combine that with product vision like the Rabbit R1 with its proposed large action model seeking to bridge the connectivity issue between apps, and the future begins to look very different for the role of UX. It is no coincidence that OpenAI has joined forces with Jony Ive to create the iPhone of AI. In the future, the user’s experience will not be through a solely visual interface. It will be through speech, chat, virtual/augmented reality, and visual possibly diminished to a supporting role.

This all begs the question of where UX will fit into this world of branded, personalized, omnichannel experiences.

Product design is becoming commoditized

The past 20 years have seen a remarkable evolution in product design. We’ve lived through waves of flat design, realism, skeuomorphism, minimalism, and every style in between. What was once copied/pasted has become robust atomic-style design systems that function across enterprise applications.

Regarding tools, we’ve gone from using print media tools like Photoshop and Illustrator to tools specifically created for the collaborative nature of digital product design. We’ve even seen disruptive companies like InVision change the entire industry, only to be shut down and replaced by the next generation of collaborative design applications. Process has evolved too. We’ve gone from traditional waterfall to a highly collaborative, iterative, user-centered design process.

The result of maturing styles, tools, and processes is that digital experiences are quite similar. Compare the experience on an Apple device vs an Android device today, and they are much more similar than they are different. Brad Frost, whose Atomic Design principles began the modern design system movement, recently proposed a global design system. For good reason too. Users have come to understand how things work, and designers are wise to leverage that knowledge. Even the differences in design style that existed a decade ago have now merged into this sort of universal mashup of user interface. Rather than create new ways to sort and view information, most companies will be better served to follow forward thinking among online retailers attempting new methods to engage with information.

Modern design tools are hard at work innovating towards the future of product design using advanced technology to create efficiency in repeatable tasks. Tasks like pattern standardization and page production (design and front-end development) are well-suited for AI. Figmas' recent acquisition of the front-end no-code tool Dynaboard is a good example of this trend. Contributors with proficiency in pixel pushing will now likely need to learn to operate the new machinery of design. This might include creating standards and rules that govern an AI that does all the heavy lifting of building. Designers will need to identify the best opportunities to brand, personalize, and enhance the user experience.

Without the need for designers at every step of the process, where does design plug-in to create the most value?

Everyone is a designer now

For over a year of mentoring on ADPList, most of my meetings were with nice people from other industries wanting to get into UX. Their interest was largely driven by UX boot camps and online programs presenting our craft as an easy, fulfilling way to get paid well and have an enjoyable lifestyle. While it can certainly be that, most of us understand that only comes with continuous curiosity, dedication, and hard work. This false expectation has unleashed thousands of young designers with barely enough training to compete in the UX job market. Their success largely depends on firms completing their training, and this year, I expect many to be forced to return to other industries.

Perhaps even more challenging, in the past few years in businesses across the country, design enthusiastically championed design thinking. We presented it as a simple and effective method to solve every business problem. We thought it would prove our worth, open doors, and endear business stakeholders to the unique value we bring. However, in our enthusiasm to train everyone in design thinking, this symbol of design “maturity”, has cheapened our services and created the expectation that anyone can do what we do.

Time will tell if it was the right thing to do. However, the net effect is a double-edged sword, as in many companies, design thinking is presented as an over-simplistic formula that anyone can apply to anything. What may not have been communicated well is the degree of skill and experience required to implement design thinking at scale within the design process of complex applications within equally complex organizations. Of course, the result of giving everyone these tools is hundreds of small, thoughtful decisions with no broader strategic cohesion. Which is probably not far from where we started.

In general, people who choose a career in UX are smart, caring, and empathetic. UX embodies what it means to be a team player. Welcoming everyone with open arms is our nature. But now, the challenge is to discern where we go from here. Perhaps the key to our future is to go beyond design thinking and adopt a transformative mindset.

How do true UX professionals communicate the unique value they personally bring to the business?

Product is emerging as the critical piece of the triad

We’ve bargained hard to be equal with other functions, the most common approach being the “triad” of leadership composed of product management, user experience design, and engineering. In reality, this approach has had varying results. And regardless, product management has always held the keys to design’s success. A simple demonstration of this is assessing a design project's business value. This involves engaging with the product to find a positive correlation between design effort and business value. This is no accident, as product leadership holds the key to value creation. Their role creates the connection between product performance and business impact, thus giving them the most influence.

UX has always struggled to create the case for business impact because it is not central to what design does. By definition, UX's focus is to represent the user. This leaves teams and designers everywhere with the impossible task of trying to justify their own existence. Too often, design does not have a good partnership with product leadership as its advocate and falls into the low-impact role of design production.

UX will keep its seat at the table. However, in the future, it will need to be represented by a new type of leader who is more capable of presenting UX's impact in the context of business value. We need product leaders who understand the interdependency between the two functions and can guide the value-creation process. This leader will likely be someone from either the design or product side who can display proficiency in leading both functions. These product/design hybrid leaders are becoming more abundant, with notable examples at Figma, Pendo, and AirBNB, among others.

How can design leaders increase their business acumen and move into areas of influence that were once reserved for other functions?

Perhaps design’s greatest sin has been its inflated sense of self-importance. “Design Makes Everything Better” was printed large on promotional t-shirts for an almost defunct design tool. We’ve felt entitled to influence and resources. This is not surprising because the job demands us to ride the fine line between self-confidence and self-importance.

Now is the time for self-reflection. As designers, is this proliferation of screens what we want for our legacy? Pausing and asking these hard questions is an opportunity to improve and refocus on using our skills for good and remaining a critical part of the product development process.