The regular issue of the AI UX Dispatch will return next week after its vacation break. However, I decided to slip this special issue in, since a number of folks have asked for my POV on what UX designers should be doing now to prepare themselves for the age of AI. It comes down to three main things ~
Build something from the ground up. Take an area you know well (for me, it was managing health as a kidney transplant recipient) and build something for it. Or take a highly personalized twist on a standard app, such as a to-do list manager. Building something you're passionate about will give you the needed hands-on experience with what's possible. Keep in mind that AI can teach you how to plan and build with AI! Be persistent; if something doesn't quite work, try again; it's how you'll learn. Be able to tell the story of how you developed your app.
Be relentless in understanding what others are doing. The whole point of this newsletter's regular issues is to help you do this. But just skimming the summaries isn't enough. Read and listen to understand. Try new things and experiment. If there was one resource I could recommend with what's happening on the leading edge of design, it's the weekly Dive Club podcast.
Plan your exit from "legacy" teams and environments. The best way to learn is to be within an organization deeply engaged with AI to define and build its products. Nobody is getting this 100% right now, and what makes sense one month might not the next. But you'll ultimately be better served in an environment where you can ride the wave with people excited to explore the new possibilities ahead.
I know this feels like a lot. Nobody expected this pace and scale of change in their careers. I recommend setting aside some time every day for proactive work with AI (I'm a big fan of mornings, before the start of the "regular" day). Think about small amounts of daily progress. You don't have to build Rome in a day! Change is happening, but these are still early days, so it's the perfect time to begin building the right skills.
BTW, these recommendations hold whether you are in an individual contributor (IC) role or a design management role. As a design manager, you can't understand the technology without hands-on experience. In fact, there is a growing trend of design managers moving back into IC roles, either all or in part, in organizations that have embraced AI for product development.
Understanding the fundamental shift
For most of us currently in the UX field, we grew up in a world where actually coding a product was the expensive part. It made sense, therefore, to have a lot of upstream UX process (traditional UCD) to mitigate the risk of building the wrong thing.
But when building is quick and cheap—that flips the calculus. I think this is the hardest thing for designers to accept right now: that AI enables other, equally valid ways to design and develop products. And that we may need to let go of beliefs that have been foundational to the discipline.
To be sure, nobody knows exactly how this is going to all land. But the ground is already shifting beneath us.
An addendum: Last issue, I highlighted the Jenny Wen interview on Lenny’s Podcast, and while I was on vacation, it apparently set off a bit of a backlash. The headline (“the design process is dead”) landed hard, and perhaps not surprisingly, some designers stopped there.
However, if you watch the full 73-minute interview, you'll find that the substance of what Wen is describing has little to do with whether the double diamond lives or dies. She’s talking about a real and accelerating change in how products are developed. I highly recommend this podcast episode if you’ve not already watched it in its entirety.
