How should UXers feel about AI? For seasoned practitioners, it’s natural to experience some discomfort about the transformative potential of AI. Headlines warn us that generative tools could make design roles redundant, or that text-based chat interfaces might replace graphical UIs, or that AI is better than humans at gathering insights and understanding user behaviour. But when I speak with my colleagues and peers, the prevailing mood isn’t fear — it’s excitement.
UX, as a discipline, is still in its infancy. A few decades ago, roles like user experience designer or UX researcher didn’t exist. The pioneers of HCI (human-computer interaction), usability, and later, UX, had no clear roadmap. Driven by curiosity, they created new practices and frameworks to ensure that software was designed and developed with humans in mind.
Now the emergence of AI is transforming software technology, embedding it more deeply and rapidly into our lives, making the core UX question — where is the human in all of this? — more relevant than ever.
Mastery of design thinking processes or proficiency in Figma can’t prepare us for the challenges AI brings. Instead, designers will have to revisit foundational principles and reimagine how people interact with computers. We’ll need to think beyond existing paradigms and embrace new possibilities, like chatbots, copilots, voice synthesis, video generation, real-time summarisation, multi-modal search, and much more.
Tools that analyse data, identify themes, synthesise findings, and extract insights are advancing rapidly. These advancements will enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of UX research. They will also raise concerns about accuracy and bias.
How we research and design is poised for reinvention. Will sketching, prototyping — even coding — become obsolete, or will they evolve?
Imagine turning a rough storyboard into a Pixar-quality animation in seconds. Imagine solving each individual user’s problems, and generating personalised experiences with unique narratives, tailored to each person’s own needs. Imagine generating instant research reports from a dataset of hundreds of user interviews, or thousands of survey responses.
AI tools offer opportunities we’ve barely begun to explore. Our success, as designers, will depend on our curiosity and adaptability. To borrow some advice from Paul Graham to startup founders, we should “live in the future, then build what’s missing.”
In other words, don’t be afraid to dabble with emerging AI tools like prototype generators, image or video generators, voice synthesis, sentiment analysis, predictive analytics, or code copilots. Even if many of these early experiments fade into obscurity, playing with these technologies sharpens our understanding of how UX roles — and UX tools — might evolve.
After all, In the early days of the internet, technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Flash were all experimental. WWW (the world wide web) competed with alternatives like Gopher and Usenet. Designers tinkered with trial software, like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Dreamweaver, and Homesite, uncertain which tools or which skills would prove essential.
I started my career in that era of discovery, happily unaware of legacy technologies. I also encountered the doubts of those in fields — such as journalism, mainframe programming, print marketing — that suddenly seemed less secure. Their futures required new skills and new approaches.
Today, I ask myself the same questions. Will “UX designer” or “UX researcher” still be a profession in twenty, ten, or even five years? What will those roles look like?
Despite these uncertainties, I’m more excited than ever about technology. The unfolding AI revolution is more transformative than the internet boom of the 90s. It’s a remarkable moment in history.
This isn’t the end of UX. It’s the beginning of a new chapter. And I feel fine.
This is an article I originally wrote for the Guidewire Design Blog.