Navigating UX in 2025 as an aspiring designer
Brief evolution of AI in UX — Beyond beautiful layouts
How the field of UI/UX is getting redefined with extensive tooling and business value emphasis.
The first time I got interested in UI/UX design was back in 2020. During that time the boundaries of design where just starting to get pushed beyond your standard, very useful but minimalist design, with trends of motion graphics, micro-interactions and 3D illustrations.
While I drifted away from design when starting my software engineering career, the AI craze has brought me back with titles like “UX is dead, long live UX” and the endless impressive AI tools that can design and develop cutting edge apps — allegedly.
In this article I will share a brief of my recent readings on user experience and how it got affected by the AI boom (more like AI craze), and how I think aspiring designers should do to stay relevant in the upcoming years.
The timeline
The initial breakthrough
After the breakthrough of the smartphone, interactivity became the pillar of any digital portal. The user provides a command through buttons, with interfaces resembling their physical inspirations such as the original iOS apps like the Notes app with yellow bounded looking pages.
The flat-UI contrast
Also led by Apple, detailed skeuomorphic components became minimalistic and elegant. The interfaces relied on well-picked typography to build the layout.
The introduction of design systems
Starring Google’s material, interfaces slowly evolved to have a digital identity enhanced with new modes of interactions, gesture and later on micro-interactions, opening doors to new marketing strategies and fully digital products.
Vairying disciples
This evolution has created the job of a UI/UX designer, which in many cases extended to UI designer, UX designer, graphic designer, 3D designer, motion designer.
The curse of beautiful interfaces
Everyone wants the most beautiful interface. And with coding technologies developing at their own pace, the bridge between conceptual designs and feasible implementation was fairly large. It was until the AI boom that we began to see this gap being addressed, with designers vibe coding their way to the technical side.
The design process: A needed revision
Diagram showing the five general steps of the UX process: Scoping, defining, envisioning, prototyping and evaluating.
As a UI/UX designer you will go through
1. Scoping: requirements definition, user survey conduction, competitiveness analysis.
2. Defining: story board creations, value propositions drafts.
3. Envisioning: user journey finalization, information architecture creation.
4. Prototyping: sketching, wireframing and high-fidelity mockups.
5. Evaluating: Usability testing and feedback surveys
With the agile methodology and its double-edged sword feedback loop, you can periodically cycle through these steps a few times before finalizing a product or a feature.
Here’s the catch, these steps are lengthy, include various revisions, and for larger projects, any decisions made can become too volatile in value the more time passes. Add on top the technical implementation, with developers being limited in skill and time in comparison with the ambitiously animated, interactive and smooth prototypes.
The disciples of graphics and development became so intertwined, that one person who wants to succeed individually is presented with:
- Branding and user research
- Visual arts
- Development and code optimization
- Marketing
The design process can do some extra AI spice. Let’s revisit the steps and see what boring tasks we can delegate to our AI models:
Briefly, automate the research, monitor the analysis and control the outcomes. This allows you to augment your skillset and keep up the pace with minimal compromise.
Staying ahead in heated competition
You need to be more technically and socially proficient to stand out from the AI saturated landscape of 2025.
Fundamentals will not expire. A good product will be appreciated regardless of a current trend. But with the fast paced work and infinite resources, **how do you assign value to your product and skills**?
The answer will consistently be linked to the business value that you can provide. Your role is design journeys more than products. You are a solution provider, not a service provider. You’re only an extra cost if you present a mere service. AI is a service provider, and it has all the data in the world.
Conclusion
- Its sadly easy to forget that the AI is the tool, not the driver.
- Augmenting the business value will always be the key to success.
- Don’t be tricked by the quick beautification allowed through AI.
- The AI craze will tone down, the people (your clients) will still want a human to understand them, not a black box of data.
- AI is like your swiss-army knife, if will not solve all your problems, but it will surely make it easier. The toolbox of a UI/UX designer/developer (concerning number of slashes here) has simply expanded, leaving more time to understand the human aspect of the job.
References
- UX Is Dead, Long Live UX, Article by nngroup
- Economic_Tasks_AI_Paper.pdf
- IBM AI in Customer Experience (CX)
Notes:
The scope of a designer’s job is becoming ridiculously blurry that each task has a name: UI, UX, CX, and while each component has enough details to cover, where do we draw the line? What is new job description? I’m curious to know what you think.
Thank you for reading!
