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How are you reacting to the current climate in the product design and UX space?
I have been a product designer and experience architect since before “UX” even meant anything.
I’ve never wanted for work, and I’ve always been confident in my skills as a leader both on the product and business strategy side.
But especially recently, I’ve started to feel some tremors I’ve never felt before:
- A massive amount of young talent has flooded the industry via UX programs and boot camps - and much of them are quite talented!
- Layoffs have further upped the available workers
- AI and Automation have made good designers even more efficient, and even inexperienced designers can now move at the speed of light.
I also have some personal situations at play:
- I took the last few years to launch and grow my own product business - scaling that eventually to an exit. So I’ve been out of the “product designer” game a bit - as I’ve been immersed in everything that comes with being a founder and startup growth.
- I now have a family - I can’t grind as hard as I used to.
All this gives me some qualms about the ability to find work in the future.
With an industry now flooded in talent, and AI that commodifies and democratizes UI design - making it easier than ever to spit out good design - is there job security for product designers the next few years?
What does that look like? How will pay be affected? Where will the opportunity be?
I'll say this: I've been a UX Content Strategist and a writer, and I've recently been working with AI. So far, AI has not impressed me with what I'd consider basic UX skills. It's often bad at hierarchies and signposting, and it isn't great at clarity and consistency. I get how it can help designers generate attractive outputs more quickly, but once you add "UX" to "designer," you don't have the same crap to worry about.
On top of that, experienced designers have some advantages. You've probably either sat in on, or been read into, a lot of user research. You may have worked on websites in different industries, or have deeper knowledge of a single industry. And you probably have a better sense of how the process works inside different companies, and how to manage all the parts of work required for success that aren't "the work." AI can't help with a lot of that, at least not yet.
Frontend dev here, so just spitballing.
I imagine for the best, it'll increase their importance and job security. They spend more time on finding new/innovative ux patterns to apply.
For the rest who mostly just do grunt work, pay and number of positions will go down over the coming years.
AI just feels like another tool that hyperscales the reach and accessibility of the best talent in the world. E.g. Audio recording concentrated music earnings in a few superstars. Not great for John the local busker, but big improvement in enjoyment for the rest of the population.
In my country I’m sad to see that not much effort is put on UX. It’s somehow assumed that front end developers are able to make good ui and ux without the help of a designer.
I’m a frontend dev but I have worked on in UI and UX projects before.
I think that AI might help create a good foundation for projects and maybe that is enough for people. But I think that the human touch and ingenuity is something that a machine learning model just can’t make out of thin air.
User experience research, especially in specialized fields, is in my opinion still very much important and irreplaceable.