The UX Profession: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
HCI Today summarized the key points
- •This article explains how the UX profession is being redefined in the AI era after experiencing rapid growth and a sharp decline.
- •In the late 2010s, UX expanded rapidly amid expectations of high conversion rates and improved corporate performance, but education and hands-on preparation lagged far behind workforce demand.
- •Many companies failed to integrate UX into their strategy and execution frameworks, causing design systems (design system) and collaboration between development and planning to remain superficial; designers were also vulnerable when it came to research and schedule estimation.
- •After the pandemic, as AI replaced entry-level tasks, UX hiring dropped sharply. However, the author argues that the need for experienced talent—people with skills in goal setting and research, understanding processes, and business sense—has increased.
- •Ultimately, UX must evolve beyond simply producing screens into a role that encompasses strategy, measurement, and communication—and it will become even more important in fields that require precision, such as accessibility, healthcare, and education.
This summary was generated by an AI editor based on HCI expert perspectives.
Why Read This from an HCI Perspective
This article shows that UX is being redefined beyond the role of simply making screens look good—into a more systemic function that includes goal setting, research, process understanding, and business literacy. For HCI practitioners and researchers, its significance lies in highlighting that with AI adoption, roles are not being replaced so much as that validation, contextualization, and coordination skills become even more important. In particular, it argues that you need to look not only at collaboration practices within organizations, but also at how performance is measured.
CIT's Commentary
From a CIT perspective, this piece reads less like a cautionary tale about a crisis in the UX profession and more like a process of reallocating HCI capabilities. The author suggests that UX centered on interface deliverables has collapsed, but what that really means is that the ability to translate user understanding into organizational decision-making has become more scarce. The key point here is that as AI takes over simple repetitive work, the value of ‘judgment’ grows more than the value of ‘design.’ As a result, future UX should shift away from pixell ownership and toward roles involving problem definition, providing evidence, and designing workable trade-offs. However, the article does not sufficiently address why organizations built such structures in the first place, or how education and hiring systems amplified this change. CIT believes you need to consider these factors together to develop practical strategies for transitioning into the work.
Questions to Consider While Reading
- Q.If UX is at the center of problem-solving, at what point—and in which decision-making stage—should an organization include design to achieve the greatest impact?
- Q.In an environment where AI handles draft generation and idea expansion, what core tasks must a UX researcher still perform as a human?
- Q.When expanding UX capabilities into business, engineering, and research, what new evaluation criteria should education and hiring adopt?
This commentary was generated by an AI editor based on HCI expert perspectives.
Please refer to the original for accurate details.
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