#169 The New AI Identity: What Product/UX Designers Need Now

Future of UX | Your Design, Tech and User Experience Podcast | AI Design

Host Patricia discusses the profound identity crisis facing UX designers as AI automates visible production tasks like prototyping and scree

Key takeaways

• The 'visible' part of UX (screens, flows, design systems) is becoming commoditized by AI, making it cheap and accessible to non-designers.
• Designers must focus on the 'invisible' work—strategy, user research synthesis, and evidence-based decision making—to maintain their seat at the table.

Main topics

• UX Identity Crisis
• AI-Driven Design Workflows

Notable quotes

The visible part of our job got cheap... the invisible part was never visible.

Conclusion

The future of UX belongs to those who leverage AI for production while

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) If you've been doing this job through all of it, you know what it means. There were these moments where it felt like we'd finally arrived, where every company suddenly wanted a design team, where people said things like, design is a competitive advantage and actually meant it. And then it just kind of turned. The teams got smaller, the research budget quietly disappears and now everyone can prototype. Everyone can generate a screen and a lot of people have decided that UX is basically common sense with better spacing. And I think we all feel where that leaves us. We are not in the meetings we used to be in. The role gets taken a little bit less seriously. There are layoffs everywhere and I think most of us have had at least one evening where we sat there and thought, okay, is my job actually safe? And I'm not going to pretend I'm above that. I'm not standing here with all the answers telling you everything's fine. Because here's the part I find hardest to say out loud. Some days it's just not fun anymore to be a UX designer. And I say that as someone who loves this job. And I fought really hard to get in it, into UX a decade ago. It's a thing that I built my whole life around. So I've been sitting with all of this for months now and I've come to one conclusion. Only one, really. And that's what I want to talk about today in part three of UX has an identity crisis. But first of all, welcome back to the future of UX. I'm Patricia. And as I mentioned, this is part three. So if you've been with me for the last two episodes, we talked about the identity crisis and then about the designer who lost his seat at the table. Today is the part where I stop describing the problem and want to tell you what I actually did about it. Three questions I'm sitting inside. What do you do when the job you trained for isn't the job anyone is asking for anymore? What does a designer... genuinely need to be able to do right now in September 2026 to be someone a team wants in the room and the one that I still can't answer which is whether UX gets to be a great job again or whether we are quietly building something new and just keeping the old name on it. So let me tell you what's waiting for you in the next 20 minutes. Number one is why I think this whole thing is one level from where most people are looking for a fix. Number two is how I basically started to rebuild my own role, including the part that I got completely wrong for about a year. Number three is the five thing that I actually run with AI in my week now. very concretely, very step by step and the two things that I refuse to hand over. And number four is every objection that I hear from designers before they take a step into this said out loud including the ones that I think are correct. I would say let's dive right in. So first let's be precise about what actually changed because I think we often describe it too maybe too vague and then feel bad without knowing why so the visible part of our job market got cheap making the screens building the flow putting the design system to work that's the part that everyone could see and that's the part the tools now do in a short time pretty much the visible part like all the thinking uh about who is it for or no i think like this is actually that The invisible part. So the invisible part, which is all the thinking about who is this for and what actually happens in their life. Thinking about the user. What never really explained to anyone outside of the room. So this is transparent. We just did it quietly and assume people understood what it was worth. So when the visible half collapsed in prices and the invisible half was never visible, you end up in a room where people do not know what you're for. And they're not being mean about it. They just can't see it. And then discovery becomes a two-hour workshop with colleagues. Research becomes an A-B test or synthetic users. And you spend your week polishing something that a product manager already prototyped. And I think this is the part that we don't talk about enough. That doesn't just threaten your job. It also takes a thing out of the work that made it good in the first place, at least for me. You came into this because you liked understanding people. And now you're doing production, maybe. So what do most of us do at this point? We go, we learn a tool. And I also did exactly this, as many of you. And I thought, okay, I will get really good at new things. I will put it on my website and it will be fine. But it did not work. And it took me a really long time to understand why. I think because the problem sits one level above the tools. Many of us are scared of our jobs. We're seeing that everyone can prototype now. It's not an easy time to be in right now. And I also feel that I see that every day things have changed a lot. I must say that I love to be a designer. I love to be a UX designer. For me, this is my dream job. So I really want to be a UX designer. For me, this leads me to one conclusion. I think that the role itself has to be redefined. For me, this is the conclusion. UX has an identity crisis and you'd solve an identity crisis by adding a line to your skills section. You solve it by deciding what this job is now and what you stand for inside a team and what you actually need to be able to do. to to to back that up and I had to do this myself as well why I found super uncomfortable because you know I do this for a living I run my own design studio I work with clients on exactly this so I'm quite far ahead and how I use these tools and I still sat there for a while with a repositioning that belonged to 2022 maybe and what I changed was