The State of UX in 2024
Much like late-stage capitalism, late-stage UX is characterized by its market saturation, heavy focus on financial growth, commoditization, automation, and increased financialization. Corporations exert significant influence over the economy and society, and designers can only push so far when advocating for user needs. How can we navigate this landscape as designers in 2024?
This is the 9th edition of The State of UX report by the UX Collective: a critical look at our industry based on more than 1k articles published and shared with our 500k+ subscribers in 2023.
Illustrations by Fabio Benê
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 this means 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.
If you have been in the industry long enough, you’ve seen it before: layoffs, limited design resources, and increased outsourcing. But for those of us in established markets, the current downturn comes as a rude awakening after a decade or so of uncharacteristic growth (something we should have never taken for granted).
We are now witnessing the pendulum swing in the other direction: designers feel like they are losing bargaining power within their organizations, burnout levels are higher than usual, and some folks struggle to find positions that fit their skill sets.
Despite some doomsday prophecies, it’s premature to sound the death knell—this is just one of the many deaths of UX. The design challenges we’re solving remain as attractive as they have always been, and many consider themselves lucky to work in a field they are passionate about. In navigating these uncertain times, how can we spark excitement about our craft again?
↳ What this means for designers
Leaner teams mean less mobility within a company or between jobs. It also means fewer layers of management and more accountability for each designer and the value they are able to deliver.
↳ Where opportunities lie
More accountability also means greater visibility for your work and, with it, more opportunity to demonstrate impact within your org. But if you’re looking for a new position, it might be time to look beyond the stereotypical career in Big Tech; plenty of other kinds of companies, industries, and problem spaces can benefit from strong designers.
↳ How to prepare yourself
Remember you are not alone: several people are going through the same challenges as you. Now is the time to tap into your network, discuss salaries, share job openings, investigate other career paths, and take this opportunity to reassess what success looks like for you.
Illustrations by Fabio Benê
Software brings scale to markets and democratizes access to tools: everyone (professional or amateur) is an investor on Robinhood, just like everyone is a creator on TikTok. Design, too, is more accessible than ever. Anyone can produce reasonably good designs, from creating assets on Canva to buying templates on Envato to whipping up interfaces on Figma. If all interfaces are starting to look the same, that’s because the design tools are working as designed.
Interface design needs to scale because businesses need to scale: companies will always prefer the predictability and safety that come from a radically commoditized design—thus their high investments in design systems. At the same time, the automation of the design practice can make some designers uncomfortable: how can we justify our value now that our work is so commoditized?
If the basic UI paradigms are becoming a “solved problem,” we should be looking at deeper problems to solve: the complexity of systems and their relationship across different parts of the business; brand expressiveness in visual elements; user journeys focused on accessibility and inclusion. Both good and bad things can scale. We still have the leverage to steer our organizations in the right direction.
↳ What this means for designers
While UI is becoming commoditized and standardized, the solutions we’re designing are getting more complex, nuanced, and context-specific.
↳ Where opportunities lie
Understand how you can use your craft in a way that is not just focused on the task at hand, but also enhancing the user experience and connecting their full digital ecosystem. Solving the right problem is as important as solving it right.
↳ How to prepare yourself
This shift away from componentry represents an opportunity to grow other types of skills as a designer and explore a side of the work you might not have been exposed to. No matter whether you’re focused on execution or strategy—you should have a holistic perspective of your work from inception to delivery.
Designers are often afraid of numbers; we think of them as a threat to our ideas and imagination. The reality is that businesses manipulate their numbers as easily as we manipulate Figma layers—sometimes in ill-intentioned ways. In the last year alone, many companies have tried to better their numbers by adding “AI” to their product names, and some are already experiencing backlash over their unkept promises.
At the end of the day, designers who work at for-profit companies are not helping users as a public service, but because happier users will generate more business for the companies that hired us in the first place. To be able to advocate for users in such a results-oriented market, designers need to feel comfortable asking new types of questions. Are we really trying to “increase customer satisfaction”, or are we simply trying to keep our customer service costs down? Do we have our users’ best interests in mind, or are we capitalizing on empathy merely as a business driver?
We might feel overwhelmed having to meet so many business objectives, but these objectives enable rather than obstruct our design work. Understanding how the business works can make us more successful in pushing our work forward and helping users get what they need.
↳ What this means for designers
In 2024, designers will be expected to become even more business savvy. While the economy might start to pick back up, we’ll still face pressure from employers for measurable results. This also means we’ll have to fight harder to prevent unethical business decisions and combat deceptive UX.
↳ Where opportunities lie
Designers can either become drivers of business within their organizations, or they can create the businesses they want to drive. We’re entering an era of design entrepreneurship, in which some designers are realizing that they’re not just a designer employed by a business; they’re creative business people whose skill set is design.
↳ How to prepare yourself
Understand the company numbers and leverage them in your stories. Learn to speak the business language and connect the dots between the designs you’re presenting and how they’ll drive business. But never let them gaslight you into having to prove your value in the organization. Remember to design with courage, as a human, and for humans.
Illustrations by Fabio Benê
Not long ago, the design community was rallying against deceptive design patterns, and thinking about growth hacks as a wall of shame. This feels like an uphill battle: companies that rely primarily on A/B testing for making design decisions often elect those deceitful patterns as the most successful ones. Coercive paywalls are the norm for any content platform, while subscription services can be unnecessarily difficult to cancel. Once considered harmless, social networks promote toxic voices without accountability for the consequences—from hate speech to conspiracy theories. When chaos erupts, who will take responsibility?
We can’t just design our way out of the insidious digital environments we created over the past decade. A modal asking for cookie permissions or warning about potential risks is not stopping users anymore—we are way past this point. We made our digital products all too convenient, and the ubiquitous yet impenetrable legalese of user agreements has made people numb to risks.
How can design, and the tech industry in general, live up to its stated ideal of "improving people's lives"? Should we focus on incremental improvements or on systemic problems relating to privacy, rights, and inclusion?
↳ What this means for designers
We are going to hear more and more about the human consequences of the digital spaces we inhabit, such as loneliness and depression. Safety and privacy issues will also be debated fiercely, all the while that emerging technologies bring a new layer of complexity to these longstanding challenges.
↳ Where opportunities lie
While user interfaces by themselves can’t fix business maliciousness, designers can reframe design problems as governance problems to tackle deeper, systemic challenges within organizations. Even when the root cause of the issue is beyond our control, understanding and communicating how different parts of a system contribute to the issue itself will create clarity for decision-makers.
↳ How to prepare yourself
The issues we’ve been discussing this year—privacy, ethics, and the impact of digital products on people’s lives—are questions at the heart of our job. New information ecosystems, such as VR and AR, as well as the product tsunami that AI brings require designers to re-educate themselves and always be a step ahead so we can make product decisions that will not hurt other people. The best way to prepare is to make an active effort to be informed and educated about technological, juridical, and societal developments happening around us.
While things look uncertain, as a publication that curates design-related content every week and has a good pulse on the industry, we keep being inspired by the creativity, resilience, and critical thinking coming from the design community.
We wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of the ideas and initiatives that brought us a new perspective in 2023 and that we’ll be watching closely in 2024:
The writing from Daley Wilhelm, Slava Polonski, Rosie Hoggmascall, Neel Dozome, Rei Inamoto, Meltem Kaso, Michael McWatters, Pavel Samsonov, Darren Yeo, Elvis Hsiao, Sanna Rau, Todd Roeth and so many others—our most consistent writers in 2023, who have fully embraced our editorial vision of pushing the industry to think about new perspectives with every new article.
The consistently informative and enlightening data visualizations from Pudding.Cool, an editorial platform that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays.
Maggie Appleton’s visual essays about programming, design, and anthropology, that have been pushing our thinking around technology and generative AI to a new level.
Vivianne Castillo’s thought leadership, encouraging designers to think about other aspects of work beyond the craft—building an equitable, inclusive, and more humanity-centered future. “Breathe in: I am more than what I produce. Breathe out: My rest requires no apology.” (link)
The tasteful editorial work from Rest of World, a global publication named after the term used in the West to designate “everyone else” and used by companies to lump together people and markets outside wealthy Western countries.
Brad Frost’s talk on The End of Atomic Design and his questioning around our role as designers in the world. “We are at this really important inflection point in our species where we have to hold up a mirror and really ask: What are we doing here? What are we trying to create? (...) How do we make respectful use of our time? How do we capture our human potential, rather than just drawing the same freaking rectangle for the 25th time?”
Halli Thorleifsson’s emotional talk at Config on how to navigate uncertainty and achieve great things in life despite adversities.
The work of Vitaly Friedman and his incredible team at SmashingConf, the most thoughtful, well-organized, and warm design conferences we’ve been able to join in recent years—a place for thinkers and makers to share ideas and learn from one another.
The content created by Rafael Frota, Daniel Furtado, Fred Van Amstel, Karina Tronkos, Filipe Nzongo, Hele Carmona, Kakau Fonseca, Karen Santos, Andrei Gurgel, Amyris Fernandez, Rafael Burity, Rodrigo Lemes, André Grilo, Lídia Cavalcante, Sheylla Lima, and so many others—our peers from the Brazilian UX community who, contrary to what some may say, have continuously created, published, and shared original content in Portuguese about design.
We dedicate this project to all the readers, authors, and friends of the UX Collective.
Written by: Fabricio Teixeira, Caio Braga
Illustrations by: Fabio Benê
Edited by: Emily Curtin
Narrated by: Laura Vandiver
Published by: The UX Collective (ISSN: 2766-5267) is an independent publication built to help designers think more critically about their work. You can follow our content via Email, Medium, Essays, Twitter, Linkedin. For more in-depth pieces, check our new publication DOC.
