The Impact Of AI On UX Jobs

By Margaret (Mags) Hanley , Career and Leadership Coach at Broader Term

For over 100 years, there have been doomsayers regarding robots in the workplace. From 1921, when the New York Times wrote a review titled “Will Machines Devour Man?” to the 1950s when there was talk of a ‘robot revolution’ in the UK. In the 1960s, there were calls for John F Kennedy to create an automation conference to discuss “unemployment caused by technological change and automation as soon as he got settled in the White House.” Now Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being reported to replace the equivalent of 300 million jobs.

With the advent of systems such as ChatGPT to generate text and Midjourney to create images, what is the impact of AI on UX designers?

1. Reducing the number of UI designers?

In the last 10 years, we have seen the rise of design systems focused on creating more efficient interface specifications for developers. Used either as part of the democratisation of design, giving developers and product managers the tools to create the interfaces themselves or as a way for smaller numbers of designers to ‘feed the delivery beast.’

This has resulted in

1. The rise of standard interfaces across the majority of web and app design?
2. The commoditisation of UI design skills. With a design system, you don’t need highly skilled designers to create specifications. Anyone can perform it.

I see the rise of generative AI taking these inputs and patterns to create the interface specifications without requiring UI designers. This will lead to fewer opportunities for people at the beginning of their careers, with the path of visual designer → UI designer → UX designer becoming less common.

Mitigation

The value of designers will not be in creating specifications but rather in problem-solving and understanding the context of use. UI designers must move further up the solution and ideation chain, not going directly to their prototyping tool. This could be a struggle, as we are already seeing a ‘push and pull’ between Product and Design on who has responsibility for this work.

2. UX writing will be devalued?

The most significant impact of AI over the last year has been the introduction of Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT, which can generate content based on a prompt. The difference between these models over previous generations is their understanding of language use and context that is more consistent with everyday language rather than formal grammar.

It means that content and UX writing will suffer in the same way UI Design did; AI will replace the more formulaic work. Instructional text and product information will be the first to be replaced as they are based on patterns that can be easily replicated.

Mitigation

Content design and UX writing will have champions in...

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