AI is both lifting you up and pushing you out: State of UX 2024

AI is streamlining the work of designers within large organizations, while eliminating the need for designers altogether in lower-stakes projects.

With the new wave of technologies enabled by Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs), corporations are starting to look into ways of streamlining their design processes and eliminating manual tasks from the designer’s plate. While this will allow designers to be more productive and acquire some new superpowers, these optimizations will inevitably lead to smaller teams in the coming years. Both things can be true at the same time.

At the same time, AI is taking over self-service design platforms such as Wix, Squarespace, Canva, Envato, and others. When any small business owner can design and launch an entire website with a simple text prompt, the demand for skilled designers is considerably reduced.

While some designers are learning “prompt engineering” to teach ChatGPT and other LLMs how to do their jobs, others are preparing for a way deeper transformation in the industry. In just a few years, AI won’t be a chat-based destination you go to; it will be ubiquitous on our devices, and its capabilities will be absorbed by every single one of the apps we use—both as users and designers.

What does this mean for designers?

Figma as we know it today won’t be here for much longer. Once your design library is connected to code and AI is smart enough to build ad-hoc interfaces on the fly, the designer's role as an intermediary becomes less important. Soon, Figma’s primary audience will no longer be designers, but anyone in the org—a shift that is already well underway.

Where opportunities lie?

While UI processes tend to become more automated in the future, skills such as UX Research and UX Strategy will become more critical than ever. The same is true for conceptual designs and vision thinking. We’ll always have to find the right use cases for new technologies, and we’ll continue to see design expanding beyond flat screens with the popularization of Augmented Reality and multimodal AI Agents.

How to prepare yourself?

While learning AI prompting and how to use newer generative AI tools might be helpful in the short term, what will really differentiate you as a designer in the long term is to be

strategic

in your design thinking,

more purposeful

in your design decisions, and assertive in imprinting your

perspective

onto the work you produce.