Disclaimer: this article was NOT written by AI. Honest.
I've been a bit unlucky recently. Since my boy was born and I ran into some work perturbances, I decided (was forced) to spend the last two years at home. This was, of course, wonderful as a parent, but perhaps somewhat less than ideal career-wise, especially when you're 44 years old. We're still in the post-COVID recovery era, the economy is doing... things, there is a war, and AI is here.
Yes, I know - AI has been around for a long time, and around 10 years ago it was more about Machine Learning (ML) than agents and LLMs, but now things hit home, because a UX Designer's position as I knew it is gone. Just... gone. We used to do sketching, prototyping, championing user values in large organizations, bridging gaps between design and production, and now, just like horses and phone operators, we're being replaced.
Hey Kris, are UX Designers screwed?
Let's take stock of the situation first; what is it exactly that modern AI models, running under an LLM umbrella, can actually do?
- They can brainstorm and pull ideas from a million sources faster than any human workshop or ideation process possibly could;
- They can sketch ideas much faster and more clearly than I could (and some people are REALLY good at fast prototyping);
- They immediately bridge the two gaps: between a sketch and a design, and between a design and an initial frontend implementation;
- They can make edits directly in code, which 80% of UX Designers can't do, despite what they claim in their CVs;
- They can justify their design and implementation choices, again drawing from a vast database of what actual people have built before.
This is some sobering reading, I'm sure, and if you're in the business, perhaps loosening your collar a bit is in order, so that you don't burst a vessel or something. Is all lost? Well, I hope not.
Where they get you
I'm an AI user, and I've been on board since the early days of ChatGPT and Ollama, so I've seen just how crap the first iterations were - enough to appreciate how amazing they now are. My first comics database, which I made with ChatGPT, basically didn't work, and was a labour of suffering, because I had to copy and paste every little thing between the chat client and a code editor. Since then, things have evolved massively.
With tools like Claude, I can describe a problem and get a sketch of a system or a website in minutes, and then, just like I've done with product owners and designers in my teams, I can highlight things that need changing, discuss elements, rework them, and have it all done in 15 minutes instead of between weekly sprints. That's a saving of a week.
And it goes further than that, because at this point I already have the bloody thing coded, and however I want it, too. Pure HTML and CSS? Sure. Need some extra JS to handle forms? There ya go. How about we just do it in Tailwind right away? No problem. Actually, you know what, I want a trip down memory lane; do it in Bootstrap. Or, heck, PHP. CGI?
Listen, if my job as a UX Designer is upended, I feel really sorry for the frontend developer downstream. These guys have it rough these days.
AI is just numbers
There's a sobering fact here that everyone absolutely needs to know, and that AI detractors will be sure to tell you. It's the abhorrent moral conundrum that modern AI usage and the shady people behind it bring, and the environmental impact that follows. Balancing between the need to somehow function as humans and the need to reluctantly support horrible people and businesses is older than Amazon.com, but that's where it began for me many years ago, and it's only getting worse. There, I had to get that out of the way.
Another aspect of this is the re-creative nature of modern AI and the fact that it draws from anything that has been published online in the past. Everything these systems output is, to a large extent, a recreation of someone's prior work (and they're not getting paid, which is another horrible conundrum). If you plug 20 website requests in, you're going to see emerging patterns, repeated themes, and a certain style (and font choice) come back to you. It's even apparent on this very website, because Claude will just maniacally insist on pushing JetBrains Mono everywhere, and I can't be bothered to change it, even though it's literally one prompt away.
Editor's note: I've actually changed it. But for reference, that typeface looked like this.
And therein lies the value: the human factor is irreplaceable, and the human experience is the biggest value of all. At the end of the day, the expert knowledge - and the sheer fact of really understanding why certain things should be the way they are in a design, and what role they play not only within the ecosystem but across various touchpoints - is what delivers results in the form of clicks, purchases, and people wanting to come back and remember who did them right.
Unfortunately, that's all a bit fluffy at the moment, and I'm sure it'd be an uphill battle to explain to an AI-hungry CEO. Now that I think about it, the paragraph above reads like something out of Marx's Communist Manifesto. The spectre of AI haunts Europe!
Calcifying the fluff
There's a bit of philosophising that needs to be done here. For the longest time - possibly always - what a UX Designer actually does has been somewhat unclear. It started off with sharing work with information architects; then, when "Product" became a thing in IT and graphic designers caught on that their work could also be considered UX, Product Designers suddenly appeared. Since then, there's been an explosion of UX-related titles: UX Writer, UX Strategist, UX Community Manager, and probably a dozen others. Looking at job listings, I'm often surprised that the letters UX actually appear in postings for things I'd never consider remotely close to user experience design.
The goalposts will move again; we'll probably completely lose the hands-on aspect of our work. To be perfectly honest, I won't particularly miss it; having to keep a portfolio and being judged on visual criteria alongside artists was always stupid, and if you do that as a recruiter, you should feel bad. The new role is knowing stuff: knowing the prompts, knowing the technologies, how they work, how they interact, and what I need to hand to the backend guys so that their lives are simpler.
What's stopping Product Owners from doing this without UX Designers? Well, nothing really, and I'd argue the line between UX/Product Designers and Product Owners has already been muddled. I'd say that in smaller organizations these should probably be the same role, and I've seen many UX Designers simply move on to Product Management. It only makes sense. In larger organizations, however, the Product Owner is a business-oriented position, and I've always felt uneasy about UX being pushed directly into business and performance - unless it happens in environments that warrant it, like e-commerce design.
It also has to be said that ideation and workshopping aren't going away; I'd still value the feelings and opinions of company employees who've been working in a particular segment for anything over a year over an AI scanning millions of documents, with who-knows-what taken for fact and god-knows-how-much information hallucinated. But these workshops will be better prepared now, and their findings synthesized much more quickly.
Are we gonna lose our jobs?
Yeah, sadly, most of us probably are - or, at the very least, these jobs will get redefined and rolled into other things. Just like in software development, if you're a junior or just looking to break in, it's gonna be rough. Me? I've always enjoyed the scrappy nature of UX Design - half analysis, half creativity, coming up with ideas and throwing them at the wall, checking if it worked and trying to understand why. I love to build things inside my computer. I think I'll be fine.