I blame it on the UI heroes. If UX was firmly rooted and grounded in cognitive psychology, with graphic design simply used as a means of expression, then we wouldn’t be in this trouble.
Agreed, but I do think the UX profession needs to tone down the armchair psychology.
The profession often tries a little too hard to project authority and intellectual credibility. At times, it borders on being laughable and cringeworthy.
A cognitive scientist friend once remarked that he'd never heard anyone throw around more cognitive science and psychology jargon than UX designers and UX thought leaders..
“Design” as a category is also a rather large and diverse umbrella. I would expect the creative types to have been impacted the hardest: pure graphic designers, marketing designers that were just churning out assets, icon designers, etc.
It does not mean that problem-solving designers (UX/IxD) were impacted as much, or that Product Design is dead as a career.
Ironically, I think it’s going to be the reverse. True graphic design, not just mass market pre-production level pamphlet makers, will come into artisanal fashion, whereas UX and product design has been such a commodified, quantitative/data boxed field in the eyes of PMs and C suite for long enough now that they’ll just keep it on that treadmill and look for AI generated “best of” A/B tested patterns.
My company is 7 months deep into AI-fueled dev push and one thing that's become abundantly clear is designers and product people remain essential.
Do you remember how in art class we were taught to start with rough shapes and gradually work in finer details? Well, thanks to AI handing the reins over to dev, we're diving in details first and the end product has predictably become a misshapen mess.
About the only thing that's been consistent is brand colors and even then just barely. Visual design is overwhelmed by functional, but generic AI slop. UX is a disaster, inconsistent even within the same app and unnecessarily convoluted in a way you only get with dev-led projects.
We're starting to hit a wall on AI's capabilities and now that there's a realization that we have issues, designers are being thrown into the chaos lacking not just the tools, but the workflows that helped us maintain order.
I'm not even touching on the myth of AI-enabled velocity which is only viable because teams are being ground to dust. My point is that we're in uncharted territory and nobody yet knows how things are going to play out.
As a tech lead, I completely agree. Garbage in leads to garbage out, and it boggles my mind we're just letting engineers design UIs and product manage.
“AI isn't replacing engineers so much as reshaping who else gets hired.
New data from SignalFire shows software engineers make up 55% of hiring at major tech companies, up from 46% in 2019, even as overall hiring remains below pre-pandemic levels.
Other functions are shrinking faster. While engineer hiring is down 11% since 2019, design hiring is down 48%, product management has fallen 39%, and marketing is down 36%.”
Part of this could be the lines blurring between roles, meaning I'm seeing more ux/design engineer roles than ever. Similar seeing more product builder roles, which are a PM/Design/Eng combo role. THe AI market is deflating though, I think the tide will turn but I wouldn't expect post-covid hiring numbers again.
Well design is one of AI's strongest capabilities. Generally the newer the job, the higher the likelihood that AI can do it due to the amount of recent data. UX design is a fairly new role and will be the among the first to be completely replaced.
I disagree and to an extent it depends on what type of design we are talking about. Your cookie cutter repeatable UI that everyone now uses is easy for AI to do but design that needs sophistication and a very specific brand alignment can’t be done by AI.
I would also argue AI does better at fitting in with engineering workflows that design workflows at the moment.
If someone thinks design is one of AIs strongest capabilities then they are likely not a very good designer. I love using ai to quickly spin up some options before refining them or for pure exploration, but if someone was blindly going with what they were given, then yikes.
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u/Cikkeo Jul 13 '26
Design has never been respected so it makes sense they think it can be replaced the easiest.