UX 1.0 → UX 2.0 (Post-AI): How We Got Here, Where We're Going
Sixteen years of watching the UX industry shift from every angle – and what's unmistakably coming next.
Back in 2023, I first stepped into my role as Director of UX. I was pretty excited to navigate a new territory in ways I hadn't quite anticipated.
I've spent many years across this industry: agency-side during the mobile revolution, inside product orgs, building curriculum, coaching designers. But the director chair was different. It surfaced a question almost immediately that I hadn't anticipated:what does it actually mean to be qualified for a UX Director role?
"What does it actually mean to be qualified for a UX Director role?"
It's not that I was coming from a place of self-doubt, but rather genuinely curious to see these roles emerge all at once. Prior to this point in time (2022), I've only really seen a rare handful of director roles for UX, but now suddenly they're appearing with a higher than I've ever observed. My journey led me to investigate, meeting others, whom like me, were visibly just vibing their way through: craft leaders unsure how to position design's function under business leadership, manager leaders fixated on protecting their team from the rest of the org – a whole generation of design leadership arriving at seats that nobody had defined quite yet.
"A whole generation of design leadership arriving at seats that nobody had quite defined yet."
To add to all these questions that had been emerging, I was perplexed by the shape of the discipline when I arrived as a director – now full of designers who weren’t quite the designers I had known earlier in my career. I had very distinctly known designers who led product strategy conversations, were fascinated by technological interactions, obsessively debated every WWDC, Google I/O, or new hardware release; who would gather around emerging technologies imagining entirely new services, behaviours, and interaction models before they even existed. There was a kind of shared curiosity around technology itself that felt deeply embedded within the culture of design.
Instead, what I found were designers waiting to execute what a product owner had already defined; hyper-specialized in delivering UI specifications, saying yes to whatever landed in their queue. And speaking to other design leaders revealed a similar sentiment: it was becoming increasingly difficult to find people who could imagine, vision new services, or simply think much beyond the screen itself. The profession itself was being practiced differently than I remembered.
"... what I found were designers waiting to execute what a product owner had already defined – hyper-specialized in delivering UI specifications, saying yes to whatever landed in their queue."
The thing that perplexed me most underneath all of this, is that just as AI is emerging as one of the most significant technological shifts in modern computing, the dominant reaction across much of the industry isn't excitement or curiosity, but resistance and dread. This major disconnect keeps ringing in my head, and it's time we take a real look at what exactly happened.
Design was never a single skill
Before we get into how we got here, it helps to revisit what design actually was, and what it was always supposed to be.
This discipline was never a single skill. It was a spectrum of connected capabilities: the intuition to sense what a product needs before a brief exists, the research to ground decisions in real human behavior, the technical fluency to understand the medium you're designing for, the conceptual range to imagine what doesn't exist yet, and the craft to specify it clearly enough to be built. These weren't separate jobs – they were a single designer's range, applied differently depending on the problem.
The range collapsed – gradually, then quickly – until one capability came to represent the entire profession in the eyes of the organizations hiring for it.
So how did we get here?
Sixteen years, in six beats
To understand where we are, it helps to go back to where this all began: the mobile revolution, the moment the industry started modernizing from its roots in traditional UX and information architecture into what we'd come to call product design. That's where my career started, and it's where the shape of this discipline was last fully intact.
2010–2014 · Enter the Mobile Revolution
Apple released the first iPhone in 2007; the App Store followed in 2008. Once it did, every company wanted in on what was being called the Mobile Revolution.
There were no design systems at the time; Figma didn't even emerge until a decade later in 2017. Only loose Human Interface Guidelines existed, as general guidance. Xcode didn't have the ability to visualize anything; instead you wrote pure code, compiled, and only after could you see what the app looked like. That constraint meant designers needed to understand how software was constructed, sitting alongside engineers and constructing in tandem – no prototype, no spec sheets.
2014–2015 · The "Product" Designer Emerges
Around 2014, the first wave of dev shops appeared: focused heavily on engineering, with design slapped on at the end of a project after everything was already built. For a moment it looked like design might get pushed to the margins entirely, a finishing coat applied after the real decisions had already been made.
Then a counter-wave arrived. The "Product Designer" emerged as a distinct function: someone involved before the product was defined, asking what should be built and why, not just how it should look. Where a UI/UX Designer executed within a scope handed down from product management, the Product Designer helped define that scope: drawing from human factors, systems thinking, and contextual research to shape the concept itself. It meant a seat earlier in the process, with real agency over what was being built. From the inside, it felt like the discipline was gaining ground. It was. But something else was also beginning, quietly, underneath it.
2017–2019 · Bootcamps Shift Talent Market Towards UI Technicians
The profession had been fighting for legitimacy for years, and suddenly everyone wanted it. UX bootcamp courses exploded around 2017: companies were hiring at scale, and bootcamps trained cohort after cohort to feed the demand. What felt like democratization was also, quietly, a narrowing, because what the industry needed from all those new designers wasn't the full spectrum of design capability; rather a focus on Figma fluency, handoff, and spec production.
2019–2021 · New Leadership Equates UX to UI Specs
The boomer generation of design leaders had spent years fighting for design's seat at the leadership table; and by 2017–2019, in many cases, that seat was genuinely earned. When the tech bubble burst in 2022, it became a natural C-suite exit point, and the leaders that replaced them didn't inherit their understanding of what UX actually was or its full spectrum practice. They restructured companies, reorganized, and created Director of UX roles in the process. The seat appeared everywhere at once.
The people who filled those seats weren't ready for them. Senior designers with around eight years of experience stepped up, but their expertise was in craft, not leadership. Design managers took the role too: trained to shield their teams from organizational politics, not to lead the discipline. The seats were filled – but are these leaders confidently leading the discipline into our new age of computing?
This is UX 1.0
UX 1.0 is the term I use for the full arc of pre-AI design work — the era of manual specification work that stretched from the early product designer role to where the discipline eventually arrived today. That transition began with genuine strategic and conceptual thinking embedded deeply within the craft, but gradually became overtaken by scale. As demand for production volume increased, much of that strategic substance was quietly traded away, with bootcamps that rapidly emerged to fill the growing demand for execution-oriented roles. The strategic capability the discipline had built didn’t disappear – it simply stopped being asked for.
"The strategic capability the discipline had built didn't disappear. It just stopped being asked for."
What a 2018 Grad Has Only Ever Known
If you entered the industry between 2017 and 2020, your entire understanding of design is the UI technician era. It's all you've seen, and it's easy to accept that this is simply how the industry works. That's not a failure of those people, but it does create a short-sightedness about the full scope of design – because without having seen the fuller shape of the discipline, it's difficult to know what's been lost.
That narrowed perception reinforces itself: when everyone around you is doing the same technician work, it validates the idea that UX is the job of the UI technician and vice versa. And those who entered during this time are also the most anxious, because UI technician work is the single biggest target for AI automation, with all of the major tooling being built today is aimed directly at it. But the anxiety here isn't translating into a stronger pushback and adaptation; rather without the broader context of what design actually is, there's nothing to pivot toward. Instead, “designers” firmly grip onto their UI technician work in hopes to continue working exactly the same as they do now pre-AI.
“… those who entered during this time are also the most anxious, because UI technician work is the single biggest target for AI automation”
I hear from too many bootcamp grads doing exactly that – closing their eyes, staying in Figma, and hoping the pressure passes. It won't. But that's not an indictment of the people. It's an indictment of an industry that gave them a narrow set of tools, called it a complete education, and is now changing the locks without warning them in time.
“It’s an indictment of an industry that gave them a narrow set of tools, called it a complete education, and is now changing the locks without guiding them to a path forward.”
Where We're Going
What's coming may look intimidating because of how quickly things will change, however it will also look familiar with where we were before the UI Technician era began. That means a re-emphasis in technological competency, building in the actual medium, and designing with real agency over what gets made. But the transition won't be gradual. Something big is going to switch overnight.
The UI Technician role is going to rapidly disappear, and when it does, it won't go quietly. Design leaders are failing to make the discipline's value legible in business terms; and without that rigor, the credibility gap continues to accumulate. As AI adoption reduces dependency on traditional UI technician work, organizations will conclude that "UX" was merely overhead all along, especially their perception of it never extended beyond UI technician work. That's the over-correction. It will be wrong, and the prediction includes organizations suffering deep concequences for removing the UX function – but it will happen anyway amidst the AI hype among leadership.
"... organizations will conclude that "UX" was merely overhead all along..."
What comes after is the re-correction. As the quality of software declines without design thinking in the room, organizations will feel it in ways they can measure – and strategic design re-enters. The designer that's needed for that moment hasn't fully emerged yet. But the shape of what's coming is already visible to anyone who's seen a post-AI workflow in play.
The industry is self-correcting. And in a Post-AI world, we're returning to the true value of what designers do. It's an incredibly exciting time – and we're finally becoming everything we've been waiting for.
"we're returning to the true value of what designers do"
Make sure to keep following along – the next piece gets into what UX 2.0 actually looks like. Hint: it's definitely not just UX 1.0 using generative AI tooling.