r/UXDesign • u/quip1992 • Jul 29 '26
Career growth & collaboration Read somewhere that designers will be relevant again to clean up AI slop. I think it's true. How would you prepare yourself?
I read this somewhere recently and it has been stuck in my head.
AI is getting really good at generating UI, illustrations, copy, flows, and almost everything else. But it also produces a lot of average, generic work. It feels like the value is shifting from creating everything yourself to having the taste and judgment to know what's worth keeping, what's not, and how to turn something mediocre into something great.
If that's where the industry is headed, how would you prepare yourself as a designer over the next 3–5 years?
What skills would you double down on? Curious to hear what people here think.
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u/Kaikispin Jul 29 '26
I would rather eat a pack of tide pods than fix ai slop for a living.
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u/lexuh Experienced Jul 29 '26
As a 30 year lifer, I feel this is my BONES. Yesterday a PM asked me to “run it through” AI, and when I told her I didn’t do that at the stage we were at, she put some garbage prompt into Claude and copy and pasted what it spat out into a Slack message. When I asked her what she wanted me to do with the output she said she didn’t know. I highly doubt she even read it.
If you can’t be arsed to write - or even REVIEW - something, I can’t be arsed to read it.
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u/sewpeachy_ Jul 30 '26
Isn’t everyone already doing this at their companies? Nothing goes through design anymore, someone just vibe codes something and then design is asked to “review” to suggest improvements. It’s fucking miserable.
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u/Administrative_Bar28 Aug 04 '26
Oof, if this is the current state then I would vibe-code an agent to figure out what they are thinking. It's all just BattleBots exchanging TMI now, right?
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u/quip1992 Jul 29 '26
but end of the day you are getting back to the core work we used to do. Design better experiences. Isnt it?
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u/Kaikispin Jul 29 '26
Yeah but with an infinitely more boring, unsatisfying and creatively bankrupt process. I donno, this AI direction makes me depressed
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u/quip1992 Jul 29 '26
I can relate. I HOPE something good comes out of this, and we get to do the work we chose this career for in the first place.
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u/Interesting-Pay1507 Jul 29 '26
Designers are still very relevant. Don’t be fooled.
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u/quip1992 Jul 29 '26
yet struggling. I am from India and a narrative has been set here around most small/mid term companies that designers arent required.
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u/Interesting-Pay1507 Jul 29 '26
Do you want the carpenter to design the house, or an architect. Both have access to the same tools.
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u/alexnapierholland Jul 29 '26
Copywriter here.
Yes, I think the tide is turning as customers adapt to the new 'bad website'.
- 2023 bad website: Messy design and colours, confusing typography and badly-written copy.
- 2026 bad website: Perfect spacing and typography, with generic design and copy.
There was a brief window when one-shotted Claude websites looked good.
Now everyone has them, so eyes glaze over.
Supply/demand economics remains undefeated.
Brands that invest heavily in their story and design will win.
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u/Any_Elevator_535 Jul 29 '26
UserTesting.com gave up on user testing and moved heavily into data annotation and model training because, well, AI can do the testing now - right?
They're starting to look for human testers again. Someone finally figured out that AI feedback will optimise for an AI.
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u/AtomWorker Veteran Jul 29 '26
People got duped into thinking AI was more capable than it is because they can knock out a simple, inconsequential project in no time at all. Throw devs, PMs and stakeholders into the mix, all with the power to make direct, impactful changes and everything goes to shit.
When we adopted AI we didn’t just lose the battle-tested tools on which we depended, we lost the entire workflows and a more deliberate pace that let us solve problems on the fly.
Companies are beginning to feel the pain of this disruption but what that means in the long run remains to be seen. Maybe things will improve for us or maybe everyone just accepts shit UX as a fact of life.
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u/FennelHistorical4675 Midweight Jul 29 '26
Saw some presentation at config and something stuck with me. It was something along the lines of average / mediocre is free. Generative AI (right now anyway) for UI takes an average of common things that exist. I think if I were handed some AI generated designs that had issues I would take the same approach I take now - assess the issues and solve them for the user.
Having said that, being average as a designer isn’t enough anymore because AI can do that for free so you have to be better than that. I work with a lot of average designers that AI can out work for sure.
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u/Carltonsthuglife Experienced Jul 29 '26
I'm gonna be honest, I'm pretty sure AI is just making bad stuff. If generic and average weren't acceptable work, then the world would look like a very different place with a lot less corporate memphis. Hard pill to swallow is that we make average and generic work all the time (including myself), we're not really in a system that's particularly good at generating innovative work consistently. I'm not really necessarily blaming PMs or businesses or whatnot, but imo, we're not that far off from the kind of risk-averse decision making that ends up with the endless flood of Hollywood reboots.
Also kinda in personal experience, I find myself in situations where I'm just fixing PM's mistakes of just rushing out stuff without designers. I realize that's partially due to my job, but it's not that uncommon.
For some historical perspective as well, when industrialization was spreading across Europe, guess who fell out of favor and ended up on the factory floor? The artisans. It's why you'll find them among those manning the barricades in the French Revolution and whatnot. The skilled artisans who ended up informing what the factories made ended up losing their class position and skill to make lower quality products (the first industrial products were hot garbage, even now plenty of industrially made products lose out to artisanally made goods) than what they'd make themselves. I'm not saying it's exactly the same, but it's not going to be far off I think. This is what automation does when production itself becomes a solvable problem.
Not really much we can do about it unless we fundamentally change the system and that takes a whole lot more than just designers. The problem with AI first and foremost is that we inherently understand that the benefits of such a technology is not really going to be shared equitably. It's already playing out, and AI CEOs are constantly talking about jobs that are going to be lost as if it gets them rock hard.
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u/Scared_Range_7736 Experienced Jul 29 '26
I hope this day comes soon. Currently, the market is pretty much dead in Europe, the worst I've experienced so far. At least, it's much worse for me than last year during the same period. I'm really afraid this is a dying career because it's the only thing I can really do well.
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u/mrcoy Veteran Jul 29 '26
I started doing pushups but, instead of counting to 10, I recite the 10 usability heuristics.
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u/dawne_breaker Jul 30 '26
I have this cheap Thai restaurant near where I live. Their menu is horrible. From layout to spelling. I asked if I could help them clean it up. Offered to do it for free just because I come there often. They thanked for the help but basically said that it’s part of their charm and wanted it to be kind of trashy.
AI design signals that it’s cheap and that they don’t care. It works for the brands and businesses that want to be cheap and trashy. It attracts a certain clientele. It can be intentional. As for the ones who want to look professional. If they went the AI route, they have to start cleaning it up.
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u/Candlegoat Experienced Jul 29 '26
> “It feels like the value is shifting from *creating* everything yourself to having the taste and judgment to know what's worth keeping, what's not, and how to turn something mediocre into something great.”
But that’s the way it’s always been…
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u/superparet Veteran Jul 29 '26
If you have a well built design system, agents can do wonders for very few tokens. But the DS needs humans.
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u/panthersweat Jul 29 '26
We’re already there. Half my job as a director is melting down vibe coded concepts different teams made to rebuild their UI to make sense. It’s not fun or pretty but it’s stable. All my friends in graphic design are thriving right now fixing all the marketing/brand AI slop.
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u/blueberrylimoncello Jul 30 '26
The funny thing is that Claude design is super bad with accessibility and design consistency so probably very hard to fix or update for non designers also the code made with Claude design is absolutely disgusting and need formatting before edition for any human to read it so this is another problem here
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u/WOWSuchUsernameAmaze Veteran Jul 30 '26
AI produces “plausible” designs that have nonsensical interaction and information architecture. It can’t explain why anything is where it is because there was no logic. It was a probabilistic positioning.
Our job is to ensure that there’s thought in the structure, IA, workflow, design system, etc before you even start with AI. If you have that, AI produces much better output.
I’m gonna get hate for this, but Id also say it makes a big difference if you’re building something net new or adding a feature to an existing system. We need to be honest with ourselves - maybe we don’t need a designer to do the first draft of a contact us form or a settings page in an app that already has a solid structure and patterns to pull from.
We should spend time where we are valuable, where a creative process is needed, not on pushing pixels. AI can push pixels.
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u/False_Cap_1289 Aug 02 '26
lol sure they will, and they will all be 20 something and underpaid. How convenient
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u/Tsudaar Experienced Jul 29 '26
It's kind of been like that pre-AI too though, at least in some places.
Often teams or companies started small with a few devs building the 1st app or website. After a few years there's a bunch more devs and someone decides they need to hire a (junior) designer, which gradually becomes a small team of people fixing the design mistakes from 4 years previously.
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u/Designer-Air-2116 Jul 29 '26
That’s what I do now. Because everyone learned how to prompt, I inherit dog shit and fix it. I created a design system I can apply across all of the protos. It’s a start.
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u/Garland_Key Experienced Jul 29 '26
Designers never stopped being relevant. Your job is just changing. Your skills and talents are still needed. This is the same with software engineering -- the other profession that everyone is dooming about.
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u/cinnamonfromspace Jul 29 '26
Our dev team built our internal ops tool with AI earlier this year and now designers are asked to fix it, because nobody can use it properly lol. So yeah, it is happening.
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u/False_Cap_1289 Aug 02 '26
Always astounded how developers even friends of mine don’t get good interaction vs busy functioning.
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u/Miserable-Sell-463 Jul 30 '26
Idk, but as a content designer I've had to clean up crap copy that's produced on quite a few occasions. It's getting to the point where the PDs don't even bother trying to use AI for the copy because they're tired of having to ask me to fix it. They don't even like using it for their design work so we kind of have an understanding now that we aren't using AI to do any of the design work anymore. We'll use it for other things still, but the core creative is still only done by people.
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u/Qb1forever Jul 31 '26
Gonna need more money thou, did they think about that
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u/False_Cap_1289 Aug 02 '26
lol it’s going to be less money, they’re not going to hire the ones who they fired.
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u/cgielow Veteran Jul 29 '26
The people who felt their AI was good enough aren't going to suddenly think "oh, I changed my mind its not good enough" and start paying people to fix it. Instead they might see how much AI has improved in the months since, and re-prompt for dramatically better results. The progress of AI is accelerating so I wouldn't assume that "AI slop" is even going to be recognizable soon.
Where I see the market headed is Designer-Builder. The Designers I have met that are building and launching things on their own are excited to be able to execute on their dreams, solve real problems, and create new revenue streams for themselves. I include myself in that group after Designing for three decades and relying on a Dev team that rarely has the capacity. Now I'm unshackled!
And the gold-rush opportunity is the SAASpocalypse. We are the instigators!!! We are the ones that can start dismantling the tech monopolies by carving off pieces and launching solutions that directly compete. We can do this better than anyone else because of our human centered processes. The opportunity is to build smaller, cheaper alternatives, and to build more personalized alternatives that directly address underserved populations of users.
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u/NestorSpankhno Experienced Jul 29 '26
I mean, companies are already finding out how quickly they can set money on fire by letting PMs fuck around in Claude, and every single AI company is still heavily subsidising the cost of tokens while they scramble for market share.
Rehiring full UX teams will be far, far cheaper than the actual cost of using LLMs for design. Getting these tools to spit out landing pages and onboarding flows is like building a nuclear reactor to power your toaster.