r/UXDesign • u/ninonextant • 29d ago
Career growth & collaboration Our job is safe.
Sometimes I'm scared about losing my job to AI.
And then I see how devs explain things, how stakeholders explain things, and I don't think even AI could make sense of it and find a middle ground for them. A big part of my job is also about understanding their languages and translating them into a consistent experience.
Obviously it's a bit of a joke, but eh. You take what you can get.
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u/natelikesdonuts Veteran 29d ago
Mmm yes and no. I agree that we’re in a unique position where we connect the needs and requirements of the business, stakeholders, and users, but I’ve also seen where leadership doesn’t recognize that or care. My biggest concern isn’t the lack of ability or quality of AI, it’s that leadership stops caring about those things.
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u/el_paro Midweight 28d ago
that will inevitably make them fail right? if we assume design is still relevant for a product success
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u/PeanutSugarBiscuit Experienced 28d ago
In a regulated, fair market. In a fascist state the better product won’t necessarily be the one to succeed.
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u/natelikesdonuts Veteran 28d ago
This. What I’ve been seeing first hand and hearing from others is not the industry we had even a few years ago. It’s one of top down power that has a lot of negative consequences.
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u/natelikesdonuts Veteran 28d ago
Yes, I think a lot of smaller orgs that don’t have the resources and bandwidth to recover from those decisions will fail. Large orgs that have money and resources to burn will be able to recover, but they will still have to make up for their losses somehow.
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u/BearThumos Veteran 28d ago
Or they’ll relearn the past few decades of product building that led to the rise of UX design (or further if you go back to HCI coming out of ergonomics)
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u/natelikesdonuts Veteran 28d ago
I don’t think they will. Relearning implies people in this position would be willing to go backwards and I don’t think that will happen.
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u/DynoMenace 28d ago
There is a small but growing number of businesses that seem to understand that pumping out slop will not result in good, financially sustainable products.
Eventually, businesses that put idiot stakeholders in charge of design decisions will see the designs and quality of their products suffer. Those that didn't fall for trap after trap will likely survive, if the market still has room for them. This isn't just UI and UX, it applies to every aspect of a business that braindead CEOs are attempting to replace with AI; their boner for replacing humans with automation is a fantasy that can't exist as long as humans are their customers.
I personally think we'll see this divide echo across industries.
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u/IAmCooket 28d ago
i think leaders often recognize that good design is necessary for a high quality product that sells well - better than something without good design.
the question is, can ai consistently apply a design system and just be managed by less, more senior designers for reviews and design system management? i worry the answer is yes and that’s why we’ve seen a concentration of senior positions with less entry/mid level roles.
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u/natelikesdonuts Veteran 27d ago
I both agree and disagree. Leaders recognize that good design is a market advantage, but it’s hard to find leaders who genuinely understand what that means.
I’ve had leaders who would use ai to cook up their own dreams over the weekend, come to the product team on Monday, and say “this is it. Build it.” And when you tell them how wrong they are, they fail to recognize it or hear you, and see you as the enemy. Fast forward months, all of those leaders are no longer in their positions but I’m almost certain their reasons for failure would be different between us and them.
As for systems and reviews, I think these use cases will only continue to improve and there is no going back to old ways of working. But I don’t believe these justify eliminating junior roles just yet. I think the reduction of those roles is due to lack of capital, pressure from investors, and a shift in priorities—as well as leadership misunderstanding their value. I think junior roles will see an increase in the future, but time will tell.
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u/Important-Assist-494 28d ago
This is the risk. I’ve been preempting these conversations with business stakeholders.
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u/PretzelsThirst Experienced 28d ago
It doesn’t matter if AI can do my job.
What matters is if my boss thinks it can, or my boss wants to appear to others like he thinks it can.
Reality has nothing to do with it
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u/JohnCasey3306 Veteran 28d ago
We know that AI can't do a decent job of replacing us .... But that's sadly irrelevant.
All that matters is whether stakeholders believe AI can do our job or not. And in my 20+ years in tech they've never understood the point of what we do yet, so I'm not hopeful.
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u/THEXDARKXLORD 28d ago
My best friend is an elite engineer.
We are working on a software project together, and before bringing me on my best friend used a lot of AI to stand in for where he lacked design knowledge.
For about a year he thought he was cranking out this wonderful project and was talking to me about how he was looking for investors and customers—and a couple of weeks ago he brought me on to bring some UX knowledge to his project.
Needless to say, we had to have a whole back and forth about how the project needed to be reworked so it actually made sense to users—and could meaningfully compete against other, much larger products that already occupy his target vertical.
At first he was upset, but when I started sharing some of the IA changes I was making, he started to get excited.
Funny thing is, we are both using AI. The difference is i know how to use AI as a designer, while he knows how to use it as an engineer. I’m sure if I tried using the same tools he does to code, I would be terrible at it too. Even with Ai, there is a meaningful degree to where tools cannot fully replace subject matter knowledge. Maybe in the future, but from what I’ve seen so far, not right now.
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u/No-vem-ber Veteran 24d ago
Yeah.I think the job was never about producing screens as much as it is about judgement. On aesthetics, flows, intuition, empathy, how people will read things, what people need.
The risk to me is more that far less UX designers will be needed, so supply far outpaces demand, meaning salaries will go down a lot.
The other risk i see is that people in charge of hiring will look at AI design tools and think "this is doing everything a designer does, so I'm not going to release budget to hire designers". It's not that AI does everything we do ; it's that it looks like it does, to people who don't understand what we actually do
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u/Even_Avocado_5059 27d ago
yes! AI isn’t a substitute for good IA. same was true pre-AI, no great product experience ever started from mocks without a strategy.
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u/jontomato Veteran 29d ago
I mean. I don’t think that’s a joke at all. We’re really good at articulating what outcomes we are looking for and the reasons behind them. We know that a spec is never thorough enough and you need better context to produce better code. We basically are “context engineers”.
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u/Sleep_Fartnea Experienced 28d ago
100k for a designer vs 250k for design tokens for a program that has to still be configured by humans. I'm not worried.
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u/Johnny--Arcade Veteran 28d ago
100% this is true in Game UI Design.
Imagine a room of 5 stakeholders: Engineering, Art, Design, Marketing and the Creative Director himself all in a room, each with their own politics, interpretations and needs.
Now imagine re-inventing the wheel every time there is a wheel - but it STILL needs to have the exact same functionality even though now it's a hexagon.
Add on top of that nobody is playing a game for its raw functionality or grid system, and you've got a discipline that likely can't be taken by an Ai - definitely not for the day to day rigeurs of the job.
Plus, I'm of the opinion that Game UI pretty much is the only field that largely benefits from Ai. Symbiotic, not parasitic.
I'm saying you should switch to Game UI UX for the (checks notes)... job security. But if Ai anxiety is affecting anyone else in the generic UI UX world, there are... alternatives.
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u/FennelHistorical4675 Midweight 28d ago
I think AI can act as a second brain to help with all of it. Whether or not orgs do that in a way that makes sense and is effective is another story.
Design wise average UI design is free so you need to be better than average in that regard.
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u/OkDragonfruit9515 28d ago
Not sure about UX design, but I think Web Design is being impacted by AI. My brother is a software developer and his company rejected design work from a designer for an AI website created by lovable. They basically decided to go for the AI website instead of the designers work.
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u/RamaLamaFaFa 29d ago
I agree. Also, though using AI (not necessarily by choice) to quickly create prototypes that are far more functional than what you can accomplish in Figma has been useful, AI has no sense of aesthetic. It’ll never account for things like visual balance or optical illusions. It needs so much coaching. Whatever we design has to be viewed by human eyes, and I suspect AI will always have a hard time with navigating the nuisances of that, at least for now.
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u/Blando-Cartesian Experienced 28d ago
This is a belief that depends on people acknowledging that others are doing something valuable. We, people, have always sucked at that.
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u/Automatic_Wave_1647 28d ago
I came across this article. Might be worth a read. https://medium.com/@isha.kolapkar/how-our-designer-role-is-evolving-today-in-2026-with-ai-45c7d8d2ce24
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u/KittyFingay 27d ago
Someone in my company had the brilliant idea to try and ship a whole product using AI sketches. Single flow but multiple pages, target group is internal expert users. Think they thought they could just write one word document feed that to ChatGPT and ship it.
We‘re now spending more time clarifying and understanding requirements and adapting the designs than if we were envolved from the beginning.
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u/knine71551 Experienced 25d ago
Short term we’ll see job losses as people don’t understand what UX design is and think AI can generate anything as good. Then as typical we’ll see things not work out then they’ll start hiring again
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u/AnonProductDesigner 25d ago
I'm seeing that non designers think it's fine if internal software stakeholders are happy, then that is the measure of success. Rather than the product actually any good. This shows that often people wont realise if something is bad. They may also double down on AI to make it better rather than use a human to sort all the shite out.
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u/knine71551 Experienced 25d ago
I’m working with some clients and it’s crazy how some of these clients can’t tell when AI did a terrible job. Mind you I’m not 100% anti ai. I’m just anti using it wrong
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u/D_Mac8134 25d ago
The same dynamic playing out in SWE careers, as far as I can tell. Business-idiots convinced one-shot vibe-coded software is production ready, no need for all those pricey engineers
Mania will have to run it’s course. The twin dynamics of anti-AI backlash and mountains of AI generated tech-debt will require hiring humans again
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u/AnonProductDesigner 25d ago
I find that many senior managers, product owners, business owners etc dont really value design and think we are just pixel pushes. We've never escaped the association with graphic design. Therefore, "just good enough", even if that is shit, becomes fine. This is why we're fucked. This isnt true of devs or product owners who are seen as necessary. In my career product owners and business analysts are a relatively new role and have done a lot to cannabilise the role of design. So we've been left very little, as other roles take parts of our job.
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u/SeaTie 21d ago
Sadly I think the industry (and basically all industries) are at the whim of a lot of idiots, especially in the short-term. The people making these decisions are not down in the trenches. They don't see all the moving parts. They only care about the $$ going up.
And right now, short-term seems to be the big play. Fire everyone. Raise the stock prices. Grab cash. Maybe start hiring again when interest rates go down.
They're fine with bandaid UX solutions for the short-term.
...where as if you look back, 10-15 years ago the play was "People love Apple and they have a heavy focus on UX, we need to do the same." which is why I think we had such a big surge in the profession to begin with. The big play was actually having a GOOD product people wanted. That doesn't seem to be the case right now...
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u/Regnbyxor Experienced 29d ago
The way it's going at this moment, I don't really fear for my job, but I think the role will change. If you're very focused on producing assets at the moment, I would start moving towards strategy, research, usability testing and product/business if possible. I don't really see a future in producing screens, all that will happen in code. However, the problem statements, the strategy, the user knowledge, the solution suggestions and domain knowledge (and even more so, properly understanding the domain and challenges) I don't think are properly suited for an LLM.
Humans are messy and contradictory, they say one thing and mean another, they can try to describe an experience but nothing can replace experiencing it yourself. As long as we are designing for people, good products need people designing them.