I was on a call this morning when I rattled off a few personal principles I follow when working with AI. The founder I was talking to asked me to post them in Slack. (Luckily I recorded the meeting.)

Here’s what I sent:

1. Never Let the Bot Have the First Word
If AI kicks off your creative process, you’re already behind. Start with a POV. A hypothesis. Even a terrible idea. AI is your co-pilot, not your compass. Use it to sharpen your thinking, not replace it.

2. Lazy In, Garbage Out
If your prompt reads like a Google search, you’re not ready. “Write me a PRD” is how mediocre work starts. “Here’s my edge case, my constraint, my thesis , help me push it” is how you get value.

3. Treat Output Like a First Draft, Not Gospel
AI isn’t your ghostwriter. It’s your over-caffeinated intern with zero instincts. Push back. Rewrite. Ask why like a product manager with trust issues. You’re not here to approve, you’re here to improve.

4. Be Transparent (Especially With Yourself)
Know what’s yours and what’s machine-generated. If you can’t trace the thinking, don’t present it. Your fingerprints should be on everything that leaves your hands.

5. Don’t Use AI to Dodge the Hard Work
If AI makes you faster, great. If it makes you passive, you’re just producing high-speed mediocrity. AI should be an accelerant, not an escape hatch.

6. Always Ask: Am I Getting Smarter or Just Quieter?
Good AI use provokes questions. Bad use lulls you into autopilot. If you’re nodding at your screen like it’s your boss, stop. Challenge it.

7. Know When to Turn It Off
There’s a moment in every project where the bot needs to shut up. Taste, judgment, intuition, these are still human skills. AI is a mirror. The better your input, the sharper the reflection.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying these are commandments. They’re just the rules I try to live by so I don’t end up outsourcing my brain to less than stellar work. Based on the user research I’ve done, sadly, most people aren’t there yet.

If this resonates, or if you’ve got your own rules for keeping things sharp, let’s talk.

The myth of arrival

Most of us are taught to find our UX voice in someone else’s process.

If you’ve been in UX for more than five minutes, or five years, you’ve probably been trained to chase artifacts over influence, deliverables over outcomes, frameworks over vision, feedback over clarity.

There’s always another method to try, another artifact to ship, another Figma file to perfect. But your voice doesn’t live in the noise, it lives in how you move a room. How you frame a problem no one else is seeing. How you listen to research, and know when to push back.

Everyone fumbles early. We all start by thinking it’s about the tools. We all confuse making something better with making something clearer.

You don’t find your voice at a bootcamp. You don’t find it at a certification ceremony. This isn’t Hogwarts. There’s no sorting hat to drop you into the UX House of Strategy. You build it. Mistake by mistake. Moment by moment. Through wrong turns, scary moments, and fights you didn’t know you were ready for, until you were.

The future of UX won’t be saved by frameworks. It’ll be shaped by the people willing to fight for better, even when it’s messy.

That work starts with your voice. Not when you’re polished. Not when you’re comfortable. But when you stop waiting for clarity and start creating it.

When I started to find the edges of my own voice, when my instincts first started kicking in, it wasn’t during some masterclass. It was during total, sweaty, low-level panic.

It was my first real UX job, though back then, I was an “Information Architect.” On my first day, I was handed a stack of 200 redlined wireframes. No explanation. No context. Just, “Fix these by tomorrow.”

I may or may not have held back tears. There was no way I could do this. I didn’t even recognize the software they were using (it was Visio. Anyone remember that?). Not exactly the most intuitive UX tool ever created.

I proceeded to use it completely wrong. It took me twice as long as it should have. The first few wireframes looked like they’d been made by a caffeinated raccoon.

But here’s the thing: nobody cared how pretty the wires were. They cared if the problems they highlighted actually got solved. They cared if you could explain the why behind the changes and if you could defend the choices when the redlines didn’t make sense.

That was my first real UX lesson: survival wasn’t about tools. It was about clarity. About knowing what mattered when everyone else just wanted it to look fixed. If I’m honest, I probably got 60% of it right. But that was enough. Because what I figured out fast was this: the people who last in UX aren’t the ones with the cleanest flows. They’re the ones who can explain what matters, and why, when everything feels messy, rushed, or political.

And that’s still true now. Maybe more than ever.

We’re in a moment where UX is being sidelined, downsized, or automated out of the room, not because it stopped mattering, but because too many teams forgot what it’s actually for.

Faster tools won’t fix that. Sharper voices will. That’s what this piece is about. Not just finding your UX voice, but sharpening it, so you can use it when it counts. Because if we want UX to survive this next chapter, we have to fight for what makes it valuable in the first place.

A brief history of UX (and why it matters to your voice)

UX isn’t just a discipline. It’s a pattern, a cycle of learning, applying, drifting, and if we’re lucky, correcting course. And over the last two decades, we’ve done a lot of drifting.

Designing for humans isn’t new. You can trace the roots back to ancient ergonomics in Greece or Feng Shui principles, as Emily Stevens points out. But “user experience” as a formal concept didn’t solidify until the late 20th century, when engineers, human factors experts, and eventually software designers realized that systems had to speak human.

As the Cynthia Vinney notes, the rise of Apple, IDEO, and the early web helped push UX out of engineering labs and into business strategy. For a while, we had influence. We shaped behaviors, expectations, even roadmaps.

Then we got shiny.

Bootcamps exploded. So did “Unicorn job” (as defined by Nick Babich) job postings, roles that wanted designers who could code, research, prototype, animate, and probably water the office plants, too. Companies wanted UX, but didn’t always understand what it was for. It was pure Knight Rider logic: flash the lights, crank the voice modulator, and hope no one asks how it actually works.

UX became a catch-all title, one that promised strategy but often delivered styling. That’s how Jonas Hoener describes the drift, and he’s not wrong. We started churning out portfolios faster than we taught people to defend the strategy behind the work, a dynamic Sarah Doody has called out in her critiques of how UX education is failing the next generation.

UX drifted. Not because designers forgot how to solve problems, but because solving them got politically inconvenient.

Where UX once shaped the roadmap, it started decorating the backlog.

Where it once asked “why,” it now gets told “how.”

Where it once influenced product direction, it now gets looped in after decisions have already been made.

If you’re trying to find or refine your voice, you need to know that history, not just because it’s interesting, but because it explains the stakes.

The history of UX isn’t just a timeline. It’s a warning. A reminder of what happens when clarity gets replaced by compliance. When asking better questions gets replaced by rushing to the next deliverable.

If you want your voice to mean something, you have to know when the industry is drifting, and how to anchor yourself anyway.

How you actually find (and evolve) your UX voice

Most people think you “find” your UX voice one day, after enough years, enough meetings, enough Figma files. But voice isn’t something you stumble onto. It’s a set of muscles you strengthen, deliberately or accidentally, every time you do the hard parts of this work.

It’s how you handle pushback. It’s how you defend a decision under pressure. It’s how you advocate for users when it would be easier to stay quiet. And that second one might matter more.

Early in your career, it’s easy to think voice comes from mastering tools like Photoshop, Figma, or whatever the flavor of the year is.

UX design has always been a human-centered profession, one that demands listening, adaptability, and communication as much as technical skill. That’s the distinction the Indeed Design Team draws clearly in their breakdown of what separates good designers from great ones.

Tools don’t teach you how to explain a tradeoff. Or defend a user when the room starts shifting the goalposts. Or convince a room full of skeptics that the problem you’re solving actually matters.

Your voice doesn’t come from frameworks.

It comes from pressure. From standing up for something that feels messy, emotional, inconvenient and doing it anyway.

I could articulate the *why* when others were stuck in the what. That was the first shift: realizing that clarity was more valuable than cleverness.

Then I started running bars. A whole different kind of UX. You learn very quickly how to size someone up.

How to hear what they need before they say it. How to de-escalate. How to get two people aligned who think they’re in the same conversation but absolutely are not.

Sound familiar? That’s user experience. Just not the version you get from a bootcamp. It’s a critical muscle most UX education barely touches: How to read a room. How to anticipate friction before it erupts. How to navigate human tension, not just screen flows.

As Preeti Talwai puts it, “Speak up when your thoughts seem completely different from the other thoughts in the room. Speak up when you’re the new person in the room. Speak up when you’re the most junior UXR in the room. And, most importantly, speak up when you’re the only UXR in the room. That’s when your voice matters the most.”

But we don’t teach that enough. We’ve built an industry that celebrates wireframe syntax but neglects the muscle it takes to explain a decision under pressure. We churn out portfolios before we teach people how to defend the strategy behind the work.

That’s where voice breaks down: When it’s been trained to follow steps instead of framing the problem.

You don’t find your UX voice in a framework. You find it in what you’ve lived through, what you’ve fought for, and what you’ve stopped apologizing for.

If you’ve been designing for a while, you already have a voice, but you might be whispering. Or mimicking someone else. Or waiting for permission to say what you already know needs to be said.

Chen Weizhi puts it plainly: “I wasn’t going to let the resistance stop me from speaking out.” That’s not bravado. That’s clarity. UX voice isn’t just about volume, it’s about having something worth saying, and the conviction to say it even when no one wants to hear it.

Voice isn’t just how you talk. It’s how you listen. How you translate. How you show people what’s coming before they see it for themselves. That’s what makes UX valuable when everything else gets automated. If you’ve been waiting for someone to give you permission to use your voice, this is it.

How not to find your voice

One of the fastest ways to lose your voice is to copy someone else’s and convince yourself it’s working because it gets attention.

Early in my career, I worked for a leader who led by sheer force: six-foot-something, Viking energy, booming voice. He could yell at a client, hang up, and phones would ring back. I thought: *That must be an effective way to lead.*

So when I struggled running my own company and trying to sound confident, I mimicked him: his tone, his intensity, his bluntness. I barked at a client, expecting volume to equal clarity.

Spoiler: it didn’t.

They didn’t call back. They fired us. And the fault was entirely mine.

That voice worked for him. But it didn’t fit me at all.

What he did well was authentic to his personality. He was decisive, extroverted, high-power, task-oriented and acrid. That was his natural style. It worked because it matched *his* environment. But it didn’t suit mine. His words got results. Mine just echoed, then faded.

Borrowed voices don’t survive under pressure. Only your own does.

This isn’t just a gut lesson, it’s backed by behavioral research. Studies show that personality mirroring can build trust when aligned with your character, but if it doesn’t match who you actually are, it creates dissonance and erodes credibility. Leadership theory echoes this. According to Fiedler’s contingency model, your leadership style has to match both your personality and your context or it fails when pressure mounts.

And authentic leadership, a model rooted in self-awareness, values, and consistency, outperforms borrowed bravado again and again. It builds trust, clarity, and resilience. It doesn’t rely on volume. It relies on presence.

So while the industry often rewards executive charisma and confident certainty, real influence doesn’t come from who talks loudest. It comes from who knows what’s worth saying and says it like it matters.

UX doesn’t need louder voices. It needs real ones. Voices rooted in perspective, empathy, and self-awareness. Voices that can lead through ambiguity, speak clearly under pressure, and still sound like you.

From voice to value. What the work needs now

I used to think a strong UX voice meant being right. Back when I co-ran the product agency Hard Candy Shell, we were confident, cocky, even. Clients hired us to call out what no one else would. We wore bluntness like a badge of honor.

But being right isn’t the same as being effective.

In one brutal session, after 90 minutes of critiques, a client half-joked it felt like “an S&M session without a safe word.” We were so proud of that line, we almost put it on our website. Looking back, we weren’t just serving the work, we were performing for ourselves.

Eventually, I realized: influence isn’t about how much truth you can hurl at someone. It’s about whether you can make them feel safe enough to hear it.

Precision without empathy isn’t leadership. It’s theater.

If you want your voice to matter, here’s what that actually looks like:

• Frame the real problem before anyone else does: Don’t just report what research says, show what it means. Make stakes visible.
• Turn ambiguity into forward motion: Most rooms are stuck because no one knows what to do next. That’s where your voice matters most. Reduce friction. Clear fog. Point forward.
• Use your words like a design tool: Expose tradeoffs. Illuminate logic. Invite collaboration without losing clarity.
• Match your voice to the moment: Scale your presence without shrinking it. Be still when needed. Be fire when necessary.
• Know when to lead with research and when to lead with judgment. Research earns trust. Judgment earns momentum. You need both.
• Make action feel inevitable: The goal isn’t control. It’s clarity. Influence means making the next step feel obvious, safe, and necessary, even when no one’s ready.

You don’t develop that voice by accident. You build it through tension. Through misfires. Through showing up when it’s easier not to.

The industry doesn’t need more polished decks. It needs more people who can walk into chaos and bring signal. Who can lead a room, not with swagger, but with direction. Basically, we need more UX Obi-Wans and fewer PowerPoint Palpatines.

If you want your UX voice to matter, this is the moment to get specific. Own your strengths. Know your audience. And speak like the decisions depend on it, because they do.

Some companies won’t make space for it. Some teams won’t recognize it right away. That doesn’t make it less necessary. It makes it even more important.

So whether you’re one year in or twenty:

• Stop waiting for someone to ask your opinion.
• Stop practicing silence in rooms that need clarity.
• Stop polishing deliverables that don’t change decisions.

Your voice isn’t there to sound smart. It’s there to move the work. And the work needs moving.

UX reveals the truth. Voice drives the strategy.

UX has never been about pixels. It’s always been about clarity, turning complexity into direction, insight into action, ambiguity into alignment.

But frameworks alone don’t move teams. Templates don’t build trust. Systems don’t create momentum.

People do.

And that’s where your voice comes in.

In a time when AI can simulate process and crank out artifacts in seconds, the real value of UX isn’t in execution, it’s in framing. In knowing what problem we’re solving, who it’s for, and what success actually looks like when no one agrees.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Across UX, leaders are saying the same thing: the future of this work isn’t in the artifacts. It’s in the framing, in knowing what problem to solve, who it’s for, and what success looks like when no one agrees.

As Kym Primrose writes, “The industry is all about time and money; it simply cannot afford the indulgence of real UX design when a cheap and dirty solution is available.”

That’s the point. AI isn’t killing UX. It’s revealing how fragile our perspective has become. When we stop framing problems and start optimizing the past, we don’t move forward. We flatten. We conform. We disappear.

Primrose continues, “The more we hand over design tasks to systems that learn from aggregated data and historical patterns, the more we risk standardising everything.”

That’s the real threat. Not AI. But a UX industry that forgot how to lead, stopped asking better questions, and handed the wheel to systems that only know how to copy the past.

That’s the future of UX Patrick Neeman has laid out: one where success isn’t about artifacts at all, but about facilitation that leads to framing. The job now is helping teams define the problem, not just flowchart the solution.

Taylor Dykes pushes that even further. She argues that modern UX leadership doesn’t come from title, it comes from the ability to shape what happens in uncertain environments. The most valuable designers aren’t the ones waiting for instructions. They’re the ones who help a team take a step forward when no one’s quite sure what the next step should be.

And the more AI shows up in our workflows, the more that human leadership becomes non-negotiable. As Carol J. Smith has shown in her work on human-AI trust, users don’t just want accurate systems, they want accountable ones. Trust doesn’t come from precision. It comes from transparency, communication, and a clear understanding of what the system is doing and why.

That insight is echoed in research by Borbála German and Réka Pető. They found that people aren’t looking for perfect systems. They’re looking for explainable ones. They want human backup. Guardrails. Clear roles. And most of all, a sense that someone is still accountable for what happens next.

That “someone” is often you.

Which is why Sharan Phillora and Giada Gastaldello argue that the next generation of UX leaders will be defined not by deliverables, but by their ability to guide conversations, frame ambiguity, and lead teams through decision-making, not just design.

Because that’s what your voice does. It bridges the gap between research and reality. It makes action feel safe. It gives teams the confidence to move when they’re stuck.

Frameworks are just scaffolding. Your voice is the force that brings them to life. That’s what makes it matter.

The job was never just the screen

UX was never meant to be decorative. It was never supposed to be the team that gets looped in after the roadmap is already written.

This industry didn’t rise because of frameworks. It rose because people showed up with perspective and had the guts to speak it. To ask better questions. To challenge bad defaults. To stand up for the people on the other side of the screen.

That’s what made UX valuable. And that’s what we’ve lost. Somewhere along the way, we got quiet. We confused deliverables with impact. We settled for being useful when we should’ve been indispensable.

And it shows.

The real failure in UX today isn’t tools or titles. It’s the absence of perspective when decisions get made. It’s the silence when clarity is most needed. The passive yes that replaces the hard but necessary no.

Your UX voice isn’t a bonus. It’s not something you earn after enough titles. It’s the most important tool you have to shape what gets built and how it gets used.

Not someday. Not after AI “settles down.” Now.

Yes, this is hard. It’s hard to speak up in rooms that don’t want to hear it. Hard to challenge momentum when you’re the only one pulling the brakes. Hard to be the person asking “why” when everyone else just wants a deliverable.

But that’s exactly what makes it matter.

Whether you’re new to this work or leading the room: Speak before you’re invited. Frame before you’re asked. Lead even when it’s easier to follow.

If UX has a future, it won’t be because of cleaner design systems. It’ll be because the people behind them finally decided to speak up.

Your UX voice isn’t just how you design. It’s how you change what gets designed next.

So use it. Build with it. Fight with it. Share it.

You don’t find your UX voice. You build it. was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recently, a partner sent me an image to use on a client site. At first glance, it looked like another rough AI mockup. But then we looked closer. The image had started as a photo taken by a well-known photographer, someone with millions of followers on Instagram. Then it had been put through generative AI. And then it had been sloppily photoshopped.

So it wasn’t just AI-generated, it was an IP violation layered with lazy design. It was poorly edited. And it was immediately recognizable as inauthentic. The lighting didn’t match. The proportions were off. There were clear AI giveaways: uncanny hands, distorted facial features, and subtle rendering issues that gave it away instantly.

It wasn’t just rough, it was reckless. The kind of thing that says, “This was put through a machine, and no one cared enough to clean it up, or even check where it came from.”

The problem wasn’t the tools used. The problem was the judgment. Someone thought this was good enough to send to a client and pass off as “original artwork” on their site.

If we’d used it, people would’ve noticed, and not in a good way. Our client’s brand would’ve taken a hit, and not just in perception, but at a moment that actually mattered. They’re a startup. They’re bootstrapping. Every pixel, every decision, every asset counts. When someone sends them something phoned-in, it’s not just lazy, it’s disrespectful. They’re paying for design that reflects who they are and where they’re going. This would’ve undercut all of it before they even launched.

And for us? We risk looking complicit. Like we didn’t catch it, or worse, like we didn’t care either.

And this wasn’t a one-off.

Lazy lowers the bar for everyone. It’s contagious.

I’ve seen people submit conference talk proposals that were clearly ChatGPT-written: bad formatting, generic sentences, no personalization. I’ve seen client briefs so thin and AI-scraped they couldn’t hold their own weight.

Sloppy isn’t harmless, it blocks everyone downstream from doing their job well. It doesn’t just waste time. It erodes trust.

If you’ve ever watched an episode of Inspector Gadget, you know the drill: lots of noise, lots of tech, but at the end of the day, it was Penny and Brain doing the real work. That’s what AI is right now. The spectacle can be impressive, but the outcomes still depend on who’s guiding the machine.

Recently, Patrick Neeman and I spoke at UXPA Boston, where we delivered a talk focused squarely on how the industry should think about AI as a tool, especially in a time when the industry is grappling with the speed and scale of change.

This wasn’t an academic panel. It was a room full of seasoned pros, veteran UXers who understand that our field is in a moment of real crisis. That’s why we felt the need to give that talk.

To drive the point home, we built our entire deck using AI-generated images. Every slide. And we told the audience upfront: we left the errors in on purpose. Spelling mistakes, weird fingers, inconsistent shadows, the whole parade of AI quirks.

Here are a couple examples:

The point wasn’t to dunk on the tech. It was to demonstrate that you can’t just let the machine drive and expect a perfect outcome. You still need a human behind the wheel.

The day after UXPA Boston, Patrick and I were on the other side of the country speaking in Seattle at the University of Washington for the Women in UX conference. This audience was different. These were people just entering the industry, full of excitement, optimism, and thoughtful questions.

Even in their early careers, they could sense the ethical tension. They weren’t asking how to avoid AI, they were asking how to use it well. The room was full of smart, thoughtful people, many of them early in their UX careers, asking exactly the right questions. They weren’t asking, “Can I use AI to replace my job?” They were asking, “How do I use AI without cutting corners?”

They wanted to know where the line was.

And here’s the truth: That line isn’t fixed. It’s contextual. But it exists. And the more we use AI in our work, the more we have to pay attention to when we’re using it to help and when we’re using it to hide.

Tools don’t set standards. People do.

We often hear the phrase “AI is just a tool.” And that’s true. But it’s an incomplete truth. A hammer is a tool, too. You can use it to build a house or to smash a window.

The ethics don’t live in the object. They live in the intent and in the craft.

Most of the articles out there focus on the big, theoretical stuff: privacy, surveillance, explainability.

Darrell Estabrook and Gytis Markevicius have created an ethics-in-design primer that talks about fairness and user trust and it does a solid job of surfacing principles like fairness, user trust, and human-centeredness. That said, its guidance remains high-level. It talks about ‘human oversight’, but doesn’t define what that looks like when someone uses ChatGPT to write a case study and ships it without revision.

Meanwhile, Nandkumar Bhujbal argues that AI systems must preserve user autonomy which is a fair point. But autonomy is just as compromised by poor design decisions as it is by surveillance. When we let AI write the error messages or confirmation modals without review, we’re not protecting autonomy, we’re delegating it.

This leads us back to the human factor. Dennis Dickson raises a warning about ethical ambiguity as AI blends into our workflows. That’s the crux: AI isn’t visible to the end user anymore. So the ethics of how we use it get buried and designers stop asking who’s accountable.

Jay Eckert underscores the need for designers to understand their tools’ boundaries. He warns that relying on AI without critical oversight will lead to “the erosion of design as a thoughtful, human practice.” That’s the kind of phrase we should pin above our monitors.

It’s great to see people raising their voices here and, frankly, laying the groundwork.

No one has gone far enough to say what needs to be said: that pushing unpolished work live because ‘the AI wrote it’ is a choice. And a bad one.

We also need to talk about something more immediate: the ethics of effort.

Because if you’re a UX designer using AI to generate something and then pushing it live without vetting it, refining it, questioning it, that’s not ethical. That’s lazy. And laziness at scale is just as damaging as malice. Sometimes more so.

The ethics of effort

Caiden Laubach writes about how ethical AI involves using tools built with integrity, ensuring outputs respect intellectual property rights, and safeguarding user data. He also underscores the necessity of obtaining proper permissions and maintaining transparency in AI-generated content to uphold brand trust. But here’s the thing:

You don’t have to be trying to mislead to end up misleading someone. All you have to do is care less than you should.

At the Women in UX event, the thing that struck me most wasn’t fear, it was optimism. People wanted to learn how to use AI well. They weren’t resisting the tool. They were resisting the temptation to let the tool lower their standards. They knew that AI could be brilliant at first drafts. They just didn’t want it to be their last.

That’s the line.

When you use AI, use it with discipline

That’s why Patrick’s book, UXGPT, is so useful. It’s not a collection of hacks. It’s a method, a way to use AI to support clarity, not replace it. It gives structure to the chaos, and it centers the human. It helps people ask better questions, which is the entire point of good UX.

We need more frameworks like that. Because as AI continues to shape our workflows, our challenge isn’t “How do we stay ahead of the robots?” It’s “How do we stay accountable to our users, our teams, and ourselves?”

The People + AI Guidebook from Google reinforces this with its human-in-the-loop model: AI is there to assist, not decide. And yet, we’re seeing more and more tools automate decisions people care deeply about. Alan Cooper marked it as a red flag in his design philosophy when he said: “Don’t automate decisions people care about.” If we’re not applying that to our AI-infused workflows, we’re not doing UX, we’re doing automation theater.

If we want to be trusted, we have to care

This matters not just because of quality, but because of trust. As Sharath Jegan puts it, “By prioritizing transparency and explainability, designers promote trust, empower users, and uphold ethical principles in AI-driven UX design.” If we want to be trusted, we need to care, not just about privacy, but about polish.

So yes, keep talking about privacy. Keep demanding explainability. But also look at the work you’re shipping and ask:

• Did I do the hard part?
• Did I put this through a critical lens?
• Did I protect the user from my own shortcuts?

The real risk

AI can help us move faster. But it can also help us slide. That’s the ethical conversation we need to be having, not just in policy documents, but in pitch decks, design reviews, and production pushes.

Because the real risk isn’t that AI will take our jobs. It’s that we’ll let it take our standards.

And if that sounds like a Black Mirror episode, that’s because it is, Season 6, Episode 1, to be exact. But you could just as easily argue this is The Jetsons with fewer flying cars and more UX debt. Or HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, except instead of locking us out of an airlock, the algorithm just auto-publishes a homepage headline that makes no sense.

We’re not building dystopia on purpose. But we are inching toward it with every unreviewed, unrefined, uncritical “good enough” that makes it into production.

So let’s hold the line

We still have a choice. We can decide where the line is. And we can decide to hold it.

More importantly, we can model what it looks like to use AI the right way. We can show younger designers, skeptical stakeholders, and overwhelmed teams that AI doesn’t mean compromise, it means discipline. It means knowing when to hit “Generate” and when to say, “Not good enough yet.” It means raising the standard, not just because the user deserves it, but because we do.

If we do this well, AI doesn’t replace UX. It reinforces it.

When it comes down to it, design still matters. Judgment still matters. Craft still matters. And that is the hill I’ll die on, even if it was landscaped by Midjourney.

About Dan Maccarone

Dan Maccarone is a UX strategist, product designer, and co-founder of Charming Robot. He’s also the author of The Barstool MBA, an Audible Original on real-world product strategy. You can connect with Dan on LinkedIn and Twitter (he’s not calling it X).

Craft vs. Complacency: the ethics of laziness in AI-driven UX was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We didn’t just lose our influence. We gave it away. UX professionals need to stop accepting silence, reclaim our seat at the table, and design with strategic clarity, not just surface polish.

Maybe you’ve read the think pieces: UX is dead. Or dying. Or evolving. Or in a state of strategic irrelevance. Thought leaders like Pavel Samsonov, Patrick Neeman, Ed Orozco, and Cyd Harrell have all taken swings at the conversation, talking about how we’ve lost influence, lost trust, and in many cases, lost our way.

Let’s not waste time sugarcoating it: UX didn’t get sidelined by accident. We let it happen. We let ourselves be turned into ticket-takers, stylists, and decorators of decks no one reads. We watched “user-centered” become a checkbox. We accepted applause for work that never shipped and feedback that boiled down to, “Can you make it pop?”

And today we’re still arguing about job titles while AI eats our credibility, while design systems distract from actual design, while the trust we once built is slipping away. The worst part? We’re not even in the room to fight for it.

This isn’t a nostalgia play for some golden age of UX. That version had its flaws too. But we’ve reached a point where too many talented people are being treated like overhead, and too many teams are building products no one understands, no one trusts, and no one uses.

For those of us who still believe UX isn’t just about what’s on the screen, that it’s about how we show up, how we speak up, and how we make the case that what we do matters, it’s time to stop whispering from the corner. Time to speak like we matter. Time to reclaim the voice we let slip away.

How UX lost its influence

UX didn’t just get pushed out of strategic conversations. We let it happen. We focused on tools, not outcomes; process, not purpose. And now, we’re trying to design better systems from the kiddie table.

For years, we’ve been telling ourselves that we’re “advocating for the user,” but in practice, we’ve often been advocating for our own process: our sitemaps, our card sorts, our post-it note frameworks. We’ve become so obsessed with how we do the work that we’ve lost sight of what the work is supposed to achieve.

As one UX Planet article bluntly puts it, “Stop preaching UX process!” Reminding us that methodology without outcomes is theater.

Ed Orozco put it more diplomatically in his piece for UX Collective: “The highest-impact part of the design process is identifying and framing valuable problems to solve.”

Pavel Samsonov echoes the shift when he writes that “instead of using research to understand who we are building for, our orgs have been setting course based on the ideal user they’d like to sell to.”

And nowhere is this more obvious than in UX conferences, which have become increasingly insular and repetitive. Instead of pushing the industry forward, many of these events feel like echo chambers of recycled slide decks; a carousel of talks about mapping, heuristics, and job titles, as if those are the levers that truly change products, teams, or trust. You can almost hear the collective rustling of Moleskines and tote bags every time someone mentions a double diamond.

“We’ve become problem solvers with our heads up our asses about process,” as one Redditor quipped in a UX design thread about unpopular opinions.

The worst part? They’re not wrong.

This kind of echo chamber has long frustrated thoughtful practitioners. Jared Spool once criticized the UX community for treating process like religion, turning useful tools into unquestioned rituals. In a 2017 article, he warned that process shouldn’t come before vision: “When a team focuses on process first, before the vision, they can lose track of what they are trying to accomplish.”

UX became cool. That was part of the problem

Like cargo pants in the early 2000s, UX got cool fast and out of nowhere. Suddenly every startup, bank, and SaaS platform needed a “UX person,” even if they didn’t know what that meant. The title became the equivalent of hot sauce: just sprinkle it on, and your product instantly had flavor.

“We need UX,” they’d say, but they couldn’t explain why. The demand exploded, and with that came a wave of people who wanted jobs. Unfortunately, that didn’t include people who had the responsibility or the experience. UX bootcamps sprung up everywhere, promising a fast-track to a new career. The industry, eager to fill the growing demand, welcomed the influx. But while some programs were thoughtful, many prioritized speed over depth, offering just enough vocabulary to sound competent but not enough understanding to be effective.

As one UX leader told me bluntly, “Great, now you can draw boxes and make up a persona.”

This created a dangerous cycle: companies hired underprepared designers, those designers couldn’t explain their value, and stakeholders came away with the idea that UX was a soft, fragile discipline that slowed things down and overcomplicated the obvious. It’s no surprise that many orgs left those engagements with a bad taste in their mouth, thinking “we tried UX… and it didn’t work.”

But it wasn’t UX that failed. It was the version of UX that we sold them: oversimplified, overpromised, and underpowered.

Patrick Neeman summed this up well: “Companies hire for UX because someone told them to, not because they understand what it is.”

The feedback loop broke

The foundation of UX is supposed to be a feedback loop: research, insight, iteration, refinement. It’s a discipline rooted in learning. But over time, that loop fractured. Usability testing became checkbox validation. Metrics replaced user stories. What was once Discovery turned into justification. A loop became a cul-de-sac.

As Pavel Samsonov observed, many teams today run “p-hacked” usability tests, structured not to learn, but to prove what someone already wanted to do.

In other words, they ran usability tests not to uncover problems or generate insight, but to justify decisions that have already been made.

In that kind of environment, outcomes take a back seat to optics. We stopped asking the hard questions. Even when we wanted to, we didn’t have the time, the budget, or the air cover. Better to push pixels and pray.

Another reason UX keeps getting sidelined: false confidence. Teams look at half-baked flows and recycled design patterns and think, “That’s close enough.” They posit, “It worked in our last product,” or, “That’s how [insert over-glorified industry leader] does it.” Instead of questioning the fit, they assume familiarity will substitute for usability. Nathan Curtis points out that when teams rely too heavily on pattern libraries and past solutions, they often mistake speed for efficacy and reduce the space for real problem-solving in the process.

What feels efficient to a product team often feels like friction to a user. Skipping UX to save time rarely does. It just guarantees you’ll waste more of it cleaning up later.

The Nielsen Norman Group has been calling this out for years. They say that without stakeholder buy-in or an ability to tie UX work to business outcomes, teams get stuck in surface-level deliverables that lack strategic weight.

We taught ourselves the wrong lessons

Many designers came into this work because they cared. They cared about people, about systems, about making things better. Instead, they found themselves performing process for process’ sake. The post-its went up. The journey map was made. The Figma file was perfect. And nothing changed.

Others just quietly walked away.

Those who stayed learned to keep their heads down, or learned to speak the language of delivery. They learned to get excited about design tokens, or design systems, or dark mode settings. Really, anything that didn’t require facing the void of real influence.

And we started to believe the myth: that this was as good as it gets. That UX was just a phase in the software development lifecycle. That design speaks for itself. That our value should be obvious.

It isn’t.

As Cyd Harrell has said about civic design in her podcast, if we’re not working with intention, empathy, and a sense of responsibility, then we’re just performing. And if we’re just performing, we might as well do it on TikTok. At least then someone’s paying attention.

Until we learn how to speak up again. Clearly. Credibly. And in context. We’ll keep getting the version of UX that the business is willing to tolerate, not the one we know the user actually needs.

The trust crisis

What AI (and everything else) is telling us

We’re watching history repeat itself and this time at machine speed. AI is the latest shiny object in tech, being shipped fast, scaled faster, and handed to users with the same shrug we’ve seen before: “users will figure it out.” But they won’t. Or worse: they’ll stop trusting the systems we build altogether.

This isn’t just an AI problem. It’s a design problem. And more specifically, a UX credibility problem.

We’ve accidentally trained stakeholders (executives, product leads, and entire orgs) to believe UX is a nice-to-have. That was a mistake. UX isn’t some bonus level you unlock when the roadmap clears up, or a last-minute sprinkle to impress the execs. It’s not the parsley garnish on your AI steak. It’s the plate, the table, and half the damn kitchen.

As I wrote in “We Trust AI… Until We Don’t,” trust in AI has almost nothing to do with logic. It has everything to do with comfort zones. We trust autocomplete, but not AI-powered diagnosis. We’ll use facial recognition to unlock our phones, but not to approve a loan.

Comfort zones are a UX concern. But if we’ve been reduced to “make it pretty” or “clean up the flows,” we lose the ability to shape the experience people actually have with AI, not just what it looks like, but whether they trust it at all.

Cyd Harrell has long talked about the ethical implications of design in the public sector. She reminds us that government interfaces aren’t just digital interactions, they’re moral contracts. The same applies to AI. These systems don’t just serve people. They make decisions about people.

Cyd says, “Government technology should work at least as well as the private sector, because it carries the weight of moral obligation.”

If people don’t understand how a system works, or worse, believe it’s lying to them, we’ve failed. Not because of bad tech, but because of broken trust.

This erosion of trust is well-documented. A 2023 KPMG study found that 61% of global respondents were wary of trusting AI systems, with only 39% expressing confidence in their accuracy.

Similarly, A 2022 study published in the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction highlighted that trust in AI is shaped not only by performance, but also by transparency, ethical safeguards, and how well the system supports human understanding.

Meanwhile, research from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found that users build trust in AI incrementally, if it helps them succeed. Trust isn’t immediate. It’s earned, interaction by interaction, experience by experience.

Despite that, many AI tools are being rolled out like candy from a marketing piñata — with little evidence that UX research is guiding their design. As Nielsen Norman Group puts it, AI initiatives often prioritize the tech first and only loop in UX once it’s too late to influence direction. Microsoft, in its own UX guidance for responsible AI, urges teams to involve design and research from the start, not after the model is built, because trust and understanding can’t be bolted on later.

Where’s the usability testing for large language models? The participatory design sessions with real users? The accessibility work?

Spoiler: it’s happening too late, if at all.

We’re also seeing the quiet normalization of dark patterns. UI decisions designed not to help users, but to trap them. Confirmshaming. Forced continuity. Roach motel flows. These aren’t edge cases. They’re often built in on purpose and are often known as “Dark UX.” We build features that lock people into ecosystems, bury cancel buttons, manipulate behavior, or push frictionless engagement over informed decision-making.

As Deceptive Design documents, these patterns are increasingly used to boost short-term metrics at the expense of long-term trust. It’s anti-user behavior masked as clever conversion strategy, and the kind of thing a strong UX presence used to stop before it started.

In 2022, the FTC issued a policy statement calling out the rise of manipulative interfaces, citing how they “trick or trap consumers into subscriptions or disclosing personal data.” That’s what happens when UX becomes reactive, silent, or excluded from decision-making entirely.

We reward metrics that go up, even if trust goes down.

So once again, we forget the most important part of user experience: the user.

We’ve seen this movie before. In fintech. In healthcare. In hiring platforms. In government services. We ship complexity, slap on a dashboard, and expect trust. Then we act surprised when users either disengage or rage-quit the experience, like their private Slack group was just exposed to the whole company.

Here’s the part that doesn’t get said out loud enough: this isn’t just a UX failure. It’s a business failure. Because when you ignore the human, you lose the customer. Trust isn’t a soft metric. It’s a hard outcome. It’s revenue. Retention. Reputation. UX is where user needs and business goals are supposed to shake hands, not silently walk past each other like exes at a conference.

And all the while, we’re updating decks. Rebuilding flows. Writing another Jira ticket with a “low effort, high impact” tag we know isn’t fooling anyone. And still, we wait our turn to be listened to.

Spoiler: that turn rarely comes.

As Jeffrey Veen, founding partner at Adaptive Path and former VP of Design at Adobe, said, “Design without strategy is just decoration.” And if that sounds a little too business school chic, let’s bring it down to earth with Sarah Doody, who put it more plainly: “When you involve people in the process, they’re more likely to believe the results.”

Strategy comes from talking to people. Trust comes from including them. If you’re not grounding your work in outcomes, context, and conversation, you’re not designing, you’re redecorating.

UX without trust is theater. UX without outcomes is noise.

If users don’t trust the systems we design, that’s not a PM problem. It’s a design failure. And if we don’t fix it, someone else will, probably with worse instincts, fewer ethics, and a much louder bullhorn.

UX is supposed to be the human layer of technology. It’s also supposed to be the place where strategy and empathy actually talk to each other. If we can’t reclaim that space, can’t build products people understand, trust, and want to return to, then what exactly are we doing here?

Reclaiming the voice

The case for speaking up (again)

Let’s not pretend this is some Pixar redemption arc. We’re not Andy’s toys waiting to be rescued from the donation bin. We’re Woody, realizing we still matter, even if we’ve been boxed up for a few years. The job’s not over. The kid still needs us. The work still needs doing.

But here’s the thing: influence is recoverable. It didn’t die, it drifted. We let it. We traded our voices for seatbelts in the product roadmap van and forgot that we used to drive.

Getting that voice back doesn’t mean pounding the table or redesigning your portfolio for the fifth time this year. It means remembering that UX at its best doesn’t just make products better, it makes decisions smarter. It makes businesses better. It puts humanity back into systems, and it brings business objectives into focus by connecting them to actual human behavior. All in language people can understand.

Reclaiming our voice means not waiting until a stakeholder asks for a redesign. It means being in the room when the problem is being defined in the first place. It means asking better questions, earlier, and not just the “what are we solving?” kind, but “why is this even a thing we’re doing?”

Jon Yablonski phrased it well: “The best way to get people to care about UX is to show them what happens when you don’t.”

Because if we’re not involved in shaping the direction, we’re just reacting to it. That’s not strategy. That’s survival.

It also means being honest about value. If what you’re shipping doesn’t work for users, it doesn’t matter how elegant the typography is. As Cameron Moll puts it, “What separates design from art is that design is meant to be functional.” And if we don’t bring that clarity, we can’t be surprised when we’re asked to “make it pop” one more time.

And let’s stop pretending the work ends when the prototype hits the handoff doc. Your job doesn’t stop at the screen. It just starts there.

And, as Dieter Rams says, “Good design is thorough down to the last detail. Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance.”

We don’t need louder voices. We need clearer ones. We need to talk like we know what we’re solving, and who it’s for. UX isn’t valuable because it adds polish. It’s valuable because it prevents dumb, expensive mistakes before they ever leave the sprint.

Your UX voice isn’t your style or your deliverables. It’s your ability to connect what people need to what the business can deliver and to make sure no one forgets that alignment is what success actually looks like.

We don’t need more templates. We need more conviction. We need to speak plainly, challenge politely, and stay laser-focused on building things that earn trust and actually work.

Let’s build a UX practice that people don’t just invite in at the last minute, but count on from the start.

Let’s get back to that.

A few ways to start

• Ask better questions earlier. Don’t wait until usability testing to challenge assumptions. Start during planning. Be the one who says, “What are we actually trying to solve here?”
• Make your work visible. Stop hiding behind Figma files. Build bridges with product, engineering, and marketing. Show how your thinking impacts real business outcomes.
• Use data and narrative. Pair your metrics with stories. Don’t just say a design improved conversion. Tell them why it did.
• Include more voices. Great UX doesn’t come from isolation. Invite stakeholders into your process so they own the insights, not just the output.
• Stay curious, not precious. Fight the instinct to defend your solution. Defend the problem you’re solving. Everything else is just form.

Let’s stop waiting for permission and start showing what UX was always meant to be.

About Dan Maccarone

The Barstool MBA: Lessons from the Real World of Business
Dan Maccarone is the author of The Barstool MBA, an Audible Original that blends sharp storytelling with decades of product strategy experience. It’s available exclusively on Audible:
> Listen on Audible

Dan is a UX strategist, product designer, fractional Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Charming Robot, a digital product design studio based in New York. Over the past 25 years, he’s helped launch and grow companies like Hulu, Foursquare, Rent the Runway, The Skimm, and Blade, while redefining digital experiences for The New York Times, CNN, TD Ameritrade, and The Wall Street Journal.

He’s also the host of Story in a Bottle, a podcast about tech, media, and the humans behind both.

You can connect with Dan on:
🔗 LinkedIn
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We built UX. We broke UX. And now we have to fix it! was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve spent the past few weeks diving headfirst into how real people — not our tech-obsessive selves, not AI evangelists, not the kind of people who chat about LLMs in casual conversation over burritos in the Meta cafeteria — are actually using artificial intelligence. It’s been a treat. Because while we love to debate whether AI will upend civilization or just take our jobs, most people are out there using it for what actually matters: drafting emails, figuring out if they’re getting screwed on their mortgage rate, or determining if that weird rash requires a doctor’s visit or just…better life choices.

The people I spoke to weren’t clueless about tech, nor were they the ones building the next generation of AI models. They were professionals in their 30s to early 50s — engineers, financial analysts, small business owners — people with enough technical savvy to use AI tools but not so deep in the trenches that they saw every advancement as a new frontier. These were all folks outside of that bubble, from around the country, juggling careers, families, and major life decisions — whether that meant buying a house, managing investments, or figuring out how to keep their kids from falling down a TikTok rabbit hole. AI wasn’t an abstract debate for them; it was a practical tool that either helped make life easier or made them nervous about ceding too much control.

This reflects a broader trend:

According to a 2024 survey, 98% of small businesses are using AI-enabled tools, with 40% adopting generative AI applications like chatbots and image creation — nearly double the adoption rate from the previous year.

We in the tech world spend a lot of time debating AI’s future — how it’s going to change industries, upend jobs, and maybe, just maybe, turn into our robot overlord. But outside our bubble, what do people actually want from it? Where do they trust it, and where do they draw the line? No assumptions, just curiosity.

On the surface, it seems like we’ve all agreed on some unspoken rules. We’re fine with AI playing the role of helpful assistant, that Siri schedules our meetings and that ChatGPT rewrites our clunky emails. But the second it tries to be the decision-maker — the financial advisor, the doctor, the boss — things get weird. It’s like we’re all living in a Black Mirror episode where AI is the overachieving intern we’re happy to delegate to…until one day, it asks for a promotion, and suddenly, we don’t trust it anymore.

While we debate AI’s future, most people just want to know if it’ll save them time without screwing them over.

AI Is Everywhere, But Our Trust in It Has Limits — Some of Them Weird

Let’s get something out of the way: AI isn’t coming. It’s here. It’s writing our emails, optimizing our search results, predicting the next song in our playlists, and, at this point, even generating personalized meal plans based on our health data and fridge inventory. But despite its omnipresence, we’re still weirdly picky about where we trust it.

So where is the trust gap? And more importantly — why does it exist at all?

The AI Trust Spectrum: Front-Line vs. In-Depth

The trust spectrum with AI doesn’t break down by industry. It’s about control. People are comfortable letting AI handle front-line tasks — things that are quick, surface-level, and don’t require much emotional or financial risk.

Think about how often you let autocomplete finish your thoughts. AI-powered grammar tools rewrite your sentences. Recommendation engines tell you what to watch. And you don’t really care, because at worst, you delete a sentence or skip a suggested movie. The stakes are low, so trust is high.

A recent survey found that nearly 40% of U.S. adults aged 18–64 have used generative AI tools, with 28% leveraging them for work-related tasks.

This rapid adoption rate is outpacing that of past disruptive technologies like the internet and personal computers.

“I use it all the time to clean up my emails,” one person told me. “It makes me sound a little more professional, which is great. But I’m still the one deciding if I send it.”

Another put it more bluntly: “If ChatGPT makes my email sound weird, who cares? I can just fix it.”

We have no problem letting AI suggest a better way to phrase a sentence — because if it gets it wrong, the worst that happens is we sound a little awkward. But if it suggests a stock trade? We hesitate. The stakes feel higher. A misplaced comma is one thing; a misplaced investment is another. We trust it more than Dr. Google, but we don’t want it making the final call in the ER — because while AI can surface possibilities, we still want a human to look us in the eye and tell us what’s actually wrong. We let it book flights but not plan vacations, because logistics are one thing, but curating a perfect trip? That’s personal.

Even in healthcare, where AI has proven useful for analyzing medical data, there’s still a strong resistance to fully trusting it. “I’d let it flag something in my bloodwork, but I want a doctor confirming it,” one interviewee told me. “I just don’t want to be sitting in an ER and hear, ‘The computer says you’re fine — good luck!’”

This is what the AI world calls “human in the loop” — basically, the idea that AI isn’t left to make decisions on its own but works alongside humans who provide oversight, context, and the occasional reality check. It’s a safety net, ensuring AI doesn’t go rogue or make decisions without understanding the bigger picture. In other words, we’re not handing over the keys entirely.

And yet, a 2024 study found that AI alone can be just as effective in medical diagnosis as human doctors. In fact, combining AI with physicians didn’t improve diagnostic accuracy, suggesting that the issue isn’t AI’s capabilities but rather how humans are trained to trust or challenge its findings.

At its core, this is about how we define responsibility. People don’t mind AI in the background, gathering data, highlighting patterns, or flagging concerns. But when a decision carries weight — whether it’s about money, health, or life choices — we want to know there’s a human who will stand behind it. Because accountability isn’t just about making the right call, it’s about having someone to answer for it when things go wrong. It’s kind of like letting Animaniacs’ Yakko, Wakko, and Dot run a history lesson — it might be fun, but you’re double-checking the facts afterward.

We want AI to be useful, efficient, and even insightful — but we don’t want it to be the one making the final call. And that might be the biggest trust gap of all: It’s not just about AI being right; it’s about knowing that, when it matters, we’re still the ones in charge.

Trusting the Process, Not the Outcome

This isn’t just about stakes; it’s about the way we process trust. People trust AI when it works alongside them, not above them. We’re comfortable with AI that refines, suggests, and assists. But AI that replaces, overrides, or decides? That’s where the walls go up.

It’s the difference between J.A.R.V.I.S. and Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron — helpful assistant vs. rogue overlord. J.A.R.V.I.S., Tony Stark’s AI butler, was a digital sidekick — an extension of his abilities that helped run diagnostics, optimize performance, and handle the logistics of being Iron Man. But then Stark, with the best intentions, tried to take AI to the next level — building Ultron, an autonomous intelligence meant to protect humanity. And, well, Ultron took one look at the world and decided the best way to keep it safe was to eliminate the humans altogether. Not exactly the outcome Stark had in mind.

The lesson? We love AI when it makes us sharper, faster, more efficient. But the second it tries to think for us instead of with us, we panic — and, honestly, for good reason.

That pattern played out across industries. People will happily read AI-generated market summaries, when it comes to investing. They’ll skim algorithmically curated stock trends, and even let AI crunch risk assessments. But the second it suggests where to put their money, the reaction is, Hold on, let me check with my guy. Even if my guy is just another human reading the same AI-generated analysis. As one interviewee I talked to put it, “I’ll take all the insights it can give me, but I’m not letting it pull the trigger.”

Or when they’re concerned about a minor medical issue, people search symptoms online constantly, essentially crowdsourcing their own diagnoses through a mix of WebMD, Reddit threads, and Google. But if an AI were to tell them, definitively, that they have a serious illness? They’d be in a doctor’s office the next day. “I’ll trust it to give me possibilities, but not the final word,” one person said. The trust is in the process, not the finality.

People were fine with AI acting as a co-pilot, but the second it took the wheel, they got nervous. In real estate, AI-generated home listings and pricing models were helpful, but no one wanted AI to make an offer on their behalf. In customer service, chatbots were fine for FAQs, but the second a refund or cancellation was involved, they were hitting zero until a human picked up. “I’ll deal with AI as long as I know there’s a human backstop,” one interviewee summed up.

The Uncanny Valley of Decision-Making

Another reason for the trust gap? AI is too good at some things, and not good enough at others. Otherwise known as the uncanny valley.

When AI gets something almost right, but not quite, it freaks people out. An AI that can write a grammatically perfect email is great. An AI that can mimic someone’s voice but sounds just slightly off is creepy — like deepfake Tom Cruise, where your brain knows something isn’t right, even if you can’t put your finger on it. Or the deepfake of President Zelensky supposedly telling Ukrainian troops to surrender — an obvious fake, but enough to make people panic for a second before realizing the ruse.

An AI that can suggest financial investments is helpful. An AI that buys stocks on its own? Terrifying. One person I spoke to summed it up perfectly: “I think that I would be open to it. But I would probably try something…in a sort of safe way. I’m going to listen to it, but maybe only put in X amount, see what it does, see that outcome.” But in the end, they admitted they’d “rather speak to a human.”

Because that’s the thing — people want AI to give them options, not ultimatums. AI running a Monte Carlo simulation on your retirement plan? Useful. AI hitting the “all in” button on your 401(k) like it’s playing a high-stakes poker game in a Bond movie? Less so. We instinctively recoil when AI shifts from assistant to executor, from analyst to authority. It’s the digital equivalent of letting a drum machine keep the beat but yanking the sticks away when it tries to take a drum solo.

At its core, trust in AI isn’t just about capability — it’s about comfort. We’re fine with it whispering in our ear, offering insights, nudging us toward efficiency. But the moment it starts making calls on our behalf, unprompted? That’s when our brains throw up the emergency brake.

The Emotional Firewall

A huge part of the AI trust gap is emotion. We’re fine with AI handling data-driven tasks, but we want humans for nuance, context, and reassurance. Think about it — nobody questions it when their phone autocorrects a typo or when Waze reroutes them around traffic.

But the moment AI stops suggesting and starts deciding — like suddenly sending an apology email on your behalf or booking a trip without asking — that’s when the trust starts to break.

We don’t mind if AI tells us which stocks have been trending, but if it suddenly starts moving our money around, that’s when we yell, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa — let me check with my guy first.

People love using symptom checkers — essentially a giant, AI-fueled guessing game — because it feels low stakes. If it tells you your headache is just dehydration, you drink some water and move on. But the moment AI delivers a confident, serious diagnosis, the reaction is immediate: “I need to see a real doctor.” We trust AI to point us in a direction, but when the outcome really matters, we want a human to make the final call.

And yet, the line isn’t always where you’d expect it. One person told us, “I actually trust AI more than the physician’s assistant. It pulls from way more data than they can remember. But the doctor? That’s where I need a human to confirm.” AI isn’t replacing expertise — it’s challenging how we define it.

That hesitation might not always be logical. A 2025 study found that AI-generated post-operative reports were actually more accurate than those written by surgeons. In 53% of cases, human-written reports contained discrepancies, compared to only 29% for AI-generated ones — highlighting AI’s ability to reduce documentation errors.

The gap isn’t just about accuracy; it’s about how much we trust an AI to understand us — our fears, our doubts, and the psychological need to hear, “It’s going to be okay” from someone with a heartbeat. It’s like Wicked: the story you thought you knew gets flipped on its head when you actually dig deeper. We’ve spent decades assuming AI would either be a cold, calculating villain or an all-knowing oracle — but what if it’s just trying to find its place in the world, like Elphaba? The real challenge isn’t whether AI can be intelligent — it’s whether it can ever earn our empathy. But hey, lesson learned — Elphaba did end up becoming the Wicked Witch of the West, so maybe keeping one eye open isn’t the worst idea.

• AI can surface the best job candidates, but we want a human to read between the lines. (Because a résumé doesn’t tell you who’s actually good in a meeting.)
• AI can detect tumors on a scan faster than a doctor, but we need a doctor to tell us what that means. (Because pattern recognition is different from bedside manner.)
• AI can flag fraudulent transactions, but we want a person to actually fix the problem. (Because nobody wants to yell at an algorithm when their card gets declined on vacation.)
• AI can diagnose symptoms better than Dr. Google, but we still want a human to sign off. (Because “probably just a migraine” and “possible neurological disorder” require very different levels of panic.)
• AI can draft a legal contract, but we want a lawyer to make sure it won’t screw us over. (Because loopholes are only fun in heist movies.)

It’s not just about accuracy — it’s about how we want to interact with AI. We’ll trust it to inform, suggest, and analyze, but when the stakes feel personal, we still want a human in the room, for now.

The Future of Trust: AI as a Co-Pilot, Not a Captain

The lesson from all this? We don’t trust AI to replace us; we trust it to assist us. We want AI to be the backup singer, not the lead vocalist. The R2-D2 to our Luke Skywalker, not the Skynet to our Judgment Day. The companies that understand this distinction — the ones that make AI a duet, not a solo act — will be the ones that thrive.

And that’s where the real opportunity lies. AI isn’t here to take the wheel; it’s here to co-pilot (see what I did there?). The businesses, innovators, and creators who embrace AI as a tool for enhancing human intuition, not overriding it, will unlock new levels of efficiency, creativity, and problem-solving. The ones who see AI as a partner — not a replacement — will build trust, foster adoption, and, ultimately, shape the future in a way that actually works for people.

Because at the end of the day, we don’t want AI to think for us — we want it to think with us (at least not right now — remember all those things we thought we didn’t want the internet to do for us 20 plus years ago?).

• AI can analyze the data, but we want humans to interpret what it means. (Because knowing what is happening isn’t the same as knowing why it matters.)
• AI can predict outcomes, but we want humans to make the decisions. (Because probabilities and real-life stakes aren’t always the same thing.)
• AI can flag the problem, but we want humans to provide the solution. (Because an alert is useful — but what we do next is what really counts.)
• AI can streamline the process, but we want humans to guide the experience. (Because efficiency is great, but trust is built through connection.)
• AI can assist, suggest, and optimize — but we still want a human in the loop. (Because at the end of the day, we don’t just want things to work; we want to feel confident in how they work.)

At the end of the day, AI isn’t here to replace us — it’s here to collaborate with us. The companies that get that will be the ones shaping the future in a way that actually works for people. Because the future of AI isn’t about automation taking over — it’s about making us sharper, faster, and better at what we do.

It’s the right-hand man, not the frontman. The E Street Band, not Springsteen, the Watson to our Sherlock. The best AI plays support — enhancing our abilities, not sidelining them. The moment AI tries to take the wheel instead of riding shotgun, we start hitting the brakes. Because trust isn’t just about accuracy; it’s about feeling in control. And if AI wants to be more than a novelty, it has to earn that trust — one useful, well-timed note at a time.

More about AI by Dan: Generation (UX): Bridging the Past to Secure AI’s Future

As we stand on the cusp of an AI revolution, I find myself reflecting on the unique perspective that Generation X, my generation, brings to the table. Nestled between the Baby Boomers and Millennials, we’ve navigated a landscape of rapid technological change, from the dawn of personal computers to the rise of the internet.

These experiences have not only shaped our understanding of technology but have also equipped us with a resilience and adaptability that are crucial for collaborating on the development and integration of AI within the realm of user experience (UX). Much like Kevin Flynn navigating the digital frontier in “Tron,” we’ve seen the world transform from analog to digital, preparing us to face new technological challenges.

Growing up, we transitioned from typewriters to computers, witnessed the birth of the internet, and adapted from landlines to smartphones. These shifts taught us invaluable lessons about the importance of designing technology that is both accessible and user-friendly. Our thoughts of what to expect today even may have originated from what Marty McFly saw in “Back to the Future II”’s version of 2015 — hoverboards, self-lacing shoes, and self-hydrating pizzas.

While we don’t have flying DeLoreans (yet), the rapid evolution of technology has been just as mind-boggling. Our past experiences have prepped us to embrace AI, not just as a new technology, but as a powerful tool that can enhance user experiences if used correctly. We know the pitfalls and the potential, and it’s this hard-earned wisdom that positions us to collaborate effectively with other generations to ensure AI is developed in a way that truly benefits users.

THE STATE OF AI TODAY

In recent years, AI has become an integral part of our daily lives, from virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa to recommendation algorithms on Netflix and Amazon. The rapid development and deployment of AI have raised significant concerns, however. Developers and tech companies often prioritize innovation and market dominance over ethical considerations and long-term impacts. This “AI at all costs” mentality can lead to severe consequences if left unchecked.

When we think about where we imagined AI would be in 2024, pop culture painted a vivid picture. From Skynet in “Terminator” taking over the world to HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey” turning against its human operators, we envisioned a future where AI might not just serve us but control us. While we aren’t exactly battling Terminators, the rapid, sometimes reckless, advancement of AI does evoke a bit of that sci-fi anxiety.

One prominent issue is the ecological impact of AI. Training large AI models requires vast amounts of computational power, leading to substantial energy consumption and carbon emissions. For example, a study by the University of Massachusetts Amherst estimated that training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars over their lifetimes. This environmental cost is often overlooked in the race to develop more powerful AI systems, echoing the dystopian environmental collapse scenarios we’ve seen in films like “The Matrix.”

Intellectual property and consent are other critical concerns. AI models frequently scrape the web for data, including content created by artists, writers, and other creatives, without proper attribution or permission. This practice not only violates the intellectual property rights of creators but also raises ethical questions about the use of AI-generated content. For instance, OpenAI’s GPT-3 has been criticized for using copyrighted materials in its training data without explicit consent from the authors. It’s like when the replicants in “Blade Runner” are created without a second thought to their origin or purpose — except here, it’s digital content being cloned.

Moreover, the usability of AI in real-world applications often lacks ethical consideration. Facial recognition technology, for example, has been deployed in various public and private sectors without adequately addressing issues of bias and accuracy. Studies have shown that facial recognition systems are less accurate in identifying people of color, leading to potential discrimination and wrongful accusations. Despite these known issues, the technology continues to be used, highlighting a significant gap in ethical AI deployment. This brings to mind the ethical dilemmas presented in shows like “Black Mirror,” where technology’s dark side is often a consequence of unchecked advancements.

As AI continues to evolve, it’s crucial to address these concerns and ensure that the technology is developed and implemented responsibly. By learning from past technological challenges and fostering a collaborative approach across generations, we can create AI systems that are not only innovative but also ethical and sustainable. This requires a collective effort to temper the excitement around AI with a focus on its long-term implications and ethical use.

THE EVOLUTION OF TECHNOLOGY AND GENERATION X

Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, witnessed a series of technological revolutions that significantly influenced our lives. We were the first to grow up with personal computers, and we saw the internet transform from a niche tool into a ubiquitous part of daily life. These experiences fostered a deep understanding of technology’s potential and its limitations.

Growing up, GenXers experienced the transition from analog to digital. We played on Atari consoles, used Walkmans, and witnessed the birth of the internet. We faced the rapid growth and subsequent burst of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which taught us about technological and economic volatility and highlighted the importance of resilience and adaptability, traits that are now invaluable in the fast-paced world of AI.

Remember when pets.com went from the next big thing to a cautionary tale in the blink of an eye? We learned the hard way that enthusiasm needs to be backed by a solid business model. Today, that lesson helps us balance AI innovation with practical application.

The technological journey of Generation X is well-documented. According Media Culture, this generation is characterized by its adaptability and technological literacy, having straddled the pre-digital and digital eras seamlessly.

THE BIRTH OF USER EXPERIENCE

The concept of user experience emerged in the 1990s, a time when many GenXers were entering the workforce. The term “user experience” was popularized by Don Norman, a cognitive scientist who joined Apple in the early 1990s. His work emphasized the importance of designing products that are user-friendly and intuitive. GenXers, many of whom were early adopters of technology, found themselves at the forefront of this new field.

As technology advanced, so did the need for a better user experience. GenXers played a crucial role in this evolution, drawing on their personal experiences with technology to inform their work. We understood that for technology to be truly transformative, it had to be accessible and user-friendly. This understanding became the foundation of UX design.

The importance of UX was underscored by influential figures and companies during the 1990s. Jakob Nielsen, through his work on usability heuristics, and Don Norman, with his emphasis on human-centered design, laid the foundational principles of UX. Nielsen’s heuristics, such as “visibility of system status” and “user control and freedom,” became essential guidelines for evaluating and improving user interfaces. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines work on usability heuristics were seminal documents that influenced how users should interact with software and hardware.

Our involvement in these foundational projects ensures that we understand the importance of user-centered design, a principle that is critical in the development of AI. Working on early web designs taught us that flashy graphics and clunky interfaces were less important than seamless, intuitive user experiences. Those GeoCities days may make us cringe now, but they laid the groundwork for understanding what users truly need.

REVISITING AND APPLYING PAST CHALLENGES TO AI DEVELOPMENT

Reflecting on the past, GenX has faced and navigated several significant technological challenges that have equipped us with invaluable insights. These experiences have not only shaped our understanding of technology but also prepared us to address current and future challenges in AI development. By revisiting the key moments that defined our technological journey, we can understand how these lessons apply to today’s AI landscape:

• Dot-com Bubble: The rapid growth and subsequent burst of the internet bubble in the late 1990s and early 2000s presented significant challenges and learning opportunities for GenXers. We learned to navigate rapid technological advancement and economic volatility. Remember when pets.com went from the next big thing to a cautionary tale in the blink of an eye? We learned the hard way that enthusiasm needs to be backed by a solid business model.
• Social Media Privacy Concerns: As social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter emerged, GenX was the first to grapple with the privacy issues they introduced. Having lived through the early internet’s lack of privacy controls, we became vigilant about data protection. Our experience with the early internet’s lack of privacy controls has made us vigilant about data protection. We’re the ones shouting at everyone, “Hey, remember when we all had public guestbooks on our websites? Let’s not do that again.”
• Ethics in Digital Advertising: The late 90s and early 2000s saw the rise of digital advertising and contextual advertising, which brought significant ethical concerns about privacy and user data. GenXers navigated the early days of online privacy issues as advertising technologies evolved. Our experience dealing with the implications of targeted ads and the need for transparency in data usage has made us vigilant about privacy in AI development. These lessons are crucial today as AI becomes more involved in personal data analysis and targeted advertising.
• Surveillance and Privacy: The increase in surveillance technologies, such as facial recognition, has led to significant ethical debates. In the late 90s and early 2000s, GenXers witnessed the rise of government surveillance initiatives like the FBI’s Carnivore system and the Clipper Chip controversy, which sparked significant debates about privacy rights and the ethical implications of surveillance. Since then, GenXers have been key in advocating for privacy rights and ethical considerations in the deployment of these technologies and have laid the groundwork for their continued ethical AI development.
• Impact of Automation on Employment: The rise of internet and automation has sparked concerns about job displacement and the future of work for over two decades. In the late 80s and early 90s, GenX witnessed the impact of automation in manufacturing, with the introduction of robotics and computerized systems leading to job displacement. We also played a critical role during the Y2K bug remediation efforts, which highlighted the need for technological adaptability and workforce transition strategies. These experiences have prepared us to address the challenges of job displacement and the future of work in the AI era.

Today, we are witnessing the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and its integration into various aspects of our lives. AI has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with technology, making it more intuitive and responsive. However, for AI to reach its full potential, it must be designed with the user in mind.

A report by McKinsey highlights the crucial role of user-centered design in the successful development and implementation of AI technologies. The report underscores that AI applications must be designed to meet the actual needs of users to be effective and widely adopted. It stresses that UX professionals are essential in this process because they bring the necessary expertise to create AI systems that are intuitive, accessible, and aligned with user expectations.

In a recent article on LinkedIn, Patrick Neeman discusses the strengths and limitations of ChatGPT in the context of user experience. He argues that while AI models like ChatGPT excel at certain tasks, they still require the human touch to ensure that user experience remains a top priority. This aligns with the perspective of many GenX UX professionals who understand the critical role that human-centered design plays in the development of AI technologies.

We have learned from the past technological resistances and challenges mentioned above and they have taught us the importance of ethical considerations in technology development, such as transparency and user consent. Our experience with the early internet’s lack of privacy controls has made us vigilant about data protection.

We can apply these lessons to AI by advocating for the responsible use of data and ensuring that AI systems are designed to respect user privacy. By leveraging our collective wisdom, we can create AI technologies that are ethical, user-friendly, and beneficial for society. Our involvement in the evolution of internet security protocols now helps us push for robust AI ethics frameworks, ensuring new technologies don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.

THE ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS OF

As AI becomes more integrated into our lives, ethical considerations become increasingly important. Issues such as privacy, bias, and transparency must be addressed to ensure that AI is used responsibly. GenXers, with our deep understanding of technology and its impact on society, are well-positioned to navigate these ethical challenges.

Our past experiences, from the wild west days of the early internet to the privacy scandals of social media, have equipped us with the vigilance needed to advocate for robust data protection measures and user consent. We’ve seen firsthand the importance of building trust through transparency, and these lessons are crucial as we develop AI systems.

Bias in technology isn’t just a technical issue; it reflects deeper societal flaws. We’ve witnessed this through the misidentification issues in facial recognition technology and other biased algorithms. Drawing from our experiences, we push for transparent and fair AI systems that don’t perpetuate inequalities. GenXers know the consequences of unchecked bias and advocate for clear, understandable AI algorithms that build trust with users. The World Economic Forum underscores that ethical AI development is essential for user trust and responsible technology use.

No single generation can tackle these ethical challenges alone. GenX brings the wisdom of experience, Millennials contribute their tech-savvy insights, and GenZ offers fresh perspectives on what’s next. This multi-generational collaboration is vital for developing AI that is both innovative and ethical. By working together, we can leverage our collective knowledge to create AI technologies that truly benefit society. Let’s make sure our AI future leverages our hard-earned lessons from the past to avoid repeating mistakes and ensure technology serves everyone fairly and transparently.

MENTORSHIP AND KNOWELDGE TRANSFER

Mentorship plays a crucial role in professional growth and industry advancement, especially in the rapidly evolving fields of AI and UX. GenX is uniquely positioned to guide younger generations, sharing insights and lessons learned to ensure AI development prioritizes user experience and ethical considerations. It’s akin to how “The Matrix” showed us the importance of understanding both the digital and real worlds — mentorship helps bridge these two realms, ensuring that the wisdom of experience guides new technological frontiers.

Mentorship isn’t just about imparting wisdom; it’s about creating a collaborative learning environment. GenXers can provide valuable guidance to Millennials and Gen Z, helping bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application. This fosters a culture where principles like user-centered design and ethical considerations remain central to AI development.

Think of it as building a team like in “Ocean’s Eleven,” where each generation brings unique skills and perspectives to the table, making the overall approach more robust and innovative. By combining the strategic foresight of GenX with the tech-savviness of Millennials and Gen Z, we create a dynamic and forward-thinking environment for AI development.

Effective mentorship also fosters a collaborative learning environment, enhancing employee engagement, retention, and productivity within organizations . It creates a positive workplace culture where employees feel valued and supported, leading to higher job satisfaction and performance. Thus, mentorship not only benefits individuals but also contributes to the overall success and growth of organizations.

Mentorship is vital in the professional development of UX designers and AI professionals, offering guidance, support, and feedback crucial for career growth and skill enhancement. Mentors help bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application, providing insights that are essential for navigating complex challenges and developing a strong design mindset.

Mentorship allows GenXers to pass on wisdom while learning from Millennials and Gen Z. This reciprocal exchange ensures continuous improvement in AI development. By collaborating across generations, we can create AI technologies that are innovative, ethical, and truly beneficial to society, navigating AI complexities to ensure technology serves everyone fairly and transparently.

In the context of ethical AI development, mentorship is crucial. Sharing experiences with privacy concerns, bias in technology, and the importance of transparency helps the next generation develop fair, accountable, and user-friendly AI systems. Our early internet stories and UX evolution lessons provide a rich tapestry of guidance. At the same time, younger generations offer innovative solutions and ideas that we might not have considered.

THE FUTURE OF AI AND UX

The future of AI and UX development hinges on our ability to leverage past experiences and intergenerational collaboration. GenXers, with their blend of technological expertise and user experience knowledge, are invaluable contributors to this rapidly evolving field. However, the future of AI and UX will be shaped by the collective insights and innovations from Millennials and Gen Z as well.

Remember when Doc Brown in “Back to the Future” emphasized that “the future is whatever you make it”? This couldn’t be more applicable to our approach to AI. GenX’s background in technology and UX positions them to guide AI development by prioritizing user needs and ethical considerations.

Drawing from our history, such as navigating the dot-com bubble and social media privacy scandals, we understand the importance of designing AI that is both innovative and user-friendly. Our experiences with early technology transitions provide a strong foundation for mentoring the next generation, ensuring they prioritize user-centered design and ethical AI practices.

But like Marty McFly needed the wisdom of Doc Brown, we too need to integrate our knowledge with the fresh perspectives and technological fluency of Millennials and Gen Z. This multi-generational collaboration is essential for navigating AI’s complexities and ensuring technology serves everyone. Just as “The Matrix” taught us to question reality, this collaboration encourages us to question and improve the ethical implications of AI, making sure we don’t end up in a dystopian future.

Leveraging the collective skills and experiences of all generations, we can pave the way for responsible and effective AI development. This approach will create a technological landscape that is inclusive, ethical, and user-friendly. By combining the wisdom of GenX with the innovation and adaptability of younger generations, we can ensure that AI technologies truly benefit society. Think of it as building a future where AI is more “Star Trek” than “Terminator.”

The future of AI and UX depends on our ability to learn from history and collaborate across generations. By integrating GenX’s hard-earned lessons with the innovative approaches of Millennials and Gen Z, we can create AI systems that are ethical, user-friendly, and truly beneficial to society. This collaborative effort will help us navigate AI’s complexities, fostering a future where technology serves everyone fairly and transparently.

If we can avoid the mistakes of the past and combine our strengths, we’ll be able to say, like Doc Brown, “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads” — just a shared vision and collective effort.

— -

Dan Maccarone is the co-founder of Charming Robot, a product design agency. He is the author of the book “The Barstool MBA,” available on Audible, and regularly writes about design, technologyp, and user experience. Dan’s extensive background in UX and his work with numerous startups and established companies provide a unique perspective on the intersection of design and technology.*

This is the third article in a 3 part series about the state of the UX ecosystem. To start at the beginning, read this article.

Let’s get the hard part out of the way. Not everyone is cut out to work in User Experience (UX). That’s not a dig at anyone. Most of us aren’t cut out to be dentists, developers, or defensive linebackers. For those that excel at UX, it starts with seeing the world through a problem solving lens and a need to keep improving on the solutions we’ve already found.

We currently live in a world where UX is trendy and a lot of people want to break into it. “It’s sort of like when people hopped onto being HTML Developers,” says Jessica Sciorra, a veteran recruiter who works for VSA Partners in New York City. “They found that writing that stuff could make them a lot of money. It’s similar to any hot topic field. People get into it because it sounds sexy and it’s involved in new products.”

Part of the problem is that there’s still confusion as to what exactly a UX professional is. “What a UX designer is differs from company to company,” says Patrick Neeman, the Senior Director of User Experience at Icertis, a contract lifecycle management platform, and the author of the blog Usability Counts. “The reality is, even the way teams are structured have changed quite a bit, so what the role is can differ by city. Los Angeles is a very different flavor of UX. It’s agency driven. Seattle is becoming cloud central. Boston is enterprise. New York is Financial and Agency.”

To make matters worse, that confusion is spread across three camps: The candidates, the companies, and the recruiters.

First we have candidates, the people who want to work as UX designers. New to the field, they don’t know what to specialize in, so they try to be everything to everyone because, unfortunately, that’s what many job descriptions request. “New designers don’t know how to get started and they don’t realize what it is that hiring managers look for,” says Kristin Mark, an experience designer at Aconex, a Melbourne, Australia based cloud company centered around construction. “They are trying to learn technical skills and design skills and they can’t learn all that and they’re expected to.”

Which leads us to the second camp, companies who want to hire UX designers.

This becomes slightly more complicated because different types of companies look for different types of UX designers. In smaller companies where budgets are tight and headcount is small, recruiters often want to hire that one person who can wear many hats — the researcher, the wireframe maker, the prototyper, the visual designer, and, sometimes even the developer. These are what folks call unicorns and they are rarely good at any one thing. “As your career goes along you’re going to have to become more specialized,” says Jon Fox, the UX & Creative Director at Idean. “There’s only so far you can go as a unicorn. You can use being a unicorn to discover what areas you want to be in, but we want you to produce product.”

Finally we have recruiters trying to find the candidates and that is no easy task, as we learned when writing The UX of Hiring for UX Positions. “It’s popular to say one is a UX Recruiter, they are arguably the most in demand openings but toughest to fill,” says Amy Jackson, a UX recruiter and founder of Amy Jackson Talent.

Due to the high demand for UX designers, many recruiters and recruiting firms use automation to try and weed through candidates. Jackson notes, “Keyword matching might work for an engineering position that requires 5+ years Java experience but it fails for designers because the title doesn’t always reflect the role.”

In other words, “it isn’t what you are called, it is what you do”

This doesn’t always produces the best results. “Hiring is really poorly done across the industry,” says Jared Spool, founder of both the user experience company UIE and the UX school Center Centre. Whether you’re using an algorithm or speaking to someone face to face, one of the challenges is that it’s very difficult for recruiters to understand what skills the candidate is actually skilled at. “The problem with hiring is that you cannot really tell false positives and you cannot easily tell false negatives. You can’t tell if you’ve hired someone who wasn’t a good fit for the job immediately,” he says.

This is why recruiters must work extra hard to recruit for UX. It’s not just about checking a bunch of boxes to see if a candidate fits the desired education, experience, software, and has a good portfolio. You have to look beyond and look at the whole person.

The Road to the UX Profession Has Been Long

“The way I got into it was someone said ‘OK can you spell HTML?’ and we all learned how to do animated GIFs and we were still doing stuff in Flash animation,” say Neeman, who started his career as the editor of a community magazine art director before becoming an early adopter of digital design. But he’s not missing the mark of how different the market was back when UX began to surface in the 1990s.

In the 1990s and early 2000s there was pure confusion as to why you’d even need (or pay for) a User Experience Designer, a term coined by Jesse James Garrett in 2001 — or in those days Information Architect (IA). When looking to cut costs, companies would assume visual designers knew it all and would cross the IA off the budget list, to the detriment of the experience.

“For many years, the role of UX in an organization was really about proving the value of UX,” says Fox. “It was really about why do companies need to focus on UX and why do they need to take a user centric approach to design. Why is design even important? Where the industry is shifting is not in proving it’s value, but how can UX help define the direction that the business is going in.”

Adrian Howard, a UX veteran and co-founder of Quietstars in the United Kingdom, agrees. “We fought for a long time to get respect for the more user-centric stuff in the work that we do,” he says. “There was a point where you always have to make the argument that design matters. It’s much less of a fight than it used to be. Everyone can point to an Apple or a Snapchat and say, ‘look design and user focus matter.’ Because we had to fight for so long, we have a very strong sense of ownership of those things.”

The victories in the industry, though, have created a new challenge. When many of us started in the industry, there was no set standard of what a UX professional’s background needed to be. Many of us got hired because of a proclivity towards curiosity, towards problem solving and, generally had to learn on the job.

While UX is getting its due respect as an industry these days, this lack of definition, means “that one person’s [definition of] UX design could be a visual designer with a little bit of UX designer, but has never done any user research and another person’s is vice-versa” according to Howard.

In other words, such a vague and fluid description creates an opportunity for myriad paths into the industry. “One of the nice thing about the UX community is we have that umbrella with visual designers, user researchers, UI designers,” says Howard “And we also have somewhere for the generalists. The people who do a little bit of everything, which is an excellent and awesome thing to have.”

There is No Single Origin Story

In the early days of the UX industry, there were really only two criteria folks who hired us could rely on: backgrounds and the conversations during the interview process. Portfolios didn’t show that much from a UX comparison standpoint, and so we had to prove ourselves by communicating our thinking. Today, with a variety ways to show your experience, such as classes, degrees, internships, mentor referrals, and more, the way into this industry seems crowded with opportunities. But, in the end, we still should be looking for the same things that have always made great UXers.

“It’s about curiosity,” says Chris Messina, who is best known for inventing the hashtag and has held innovative roles at Mozilla, Google and Uber. “Someone who has empathy and wants to understand someone’s perspective and experience are the key drivers. If you want to get into this and you’re in finance or you’re in real estate or you’re in traditional graphic design, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you care about asking questions and you actually care about the responses.”

Curiosity is key for anyone aspiring to be in a world where you’re constantly striving to create better experiences for people. We should always be asking questions, realizing that whatever the right solution was last year, may not be the right one this year and that, try as we might, we’re never satiated with a final answer.

“I came into this wanting to learn,” says Messina. “You have to get past your own egocentricity to realize you don’t know shit about anything. You see the ways that people are living and how they’re being very efficient. And you figure out ways they have optimized their lives. The question then becomes, if they have optimized for those types of experiences or designs, what is it lacking?”

And while that’s the best place to start, it is just that: a starting point.

Just being curious won’t necessarily catch the eye of someone who’s looking to hire a new UX person. The problem is, there’s no one best way in and the paths to actually breaking into the industry have changed significantly.

“If I look back to the usability and HCI communities in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was very academic,” says Howard. “They were often much more from the ergonomics and cognitive sciences background. But we didn’t really have that group crossing over into things like visual design and UI design and things more like the information science stuff. Those were seen as very separate disciplines.”

Howard’s point of view is echoed by Sciorra, who has been placing UX professionals since the early 1990’s. “The first UX guys I was placing were coming from industrial design,” she says. “Back then there were more user interface people than User Experience people. When I placed a User Interface Designer for Prodigy in 1991 or 1992, it was straight up a design job.”

When looking for candidates today, it’s a very different scenario because people actually have a background in this and the types of projects they worked on can determine whether or not they’re a fit for a job more than just that they’ve been doing this for five or 10 or 20 years. “It is about the quality of experience someone has over time with a brand,” says Sciorra. “You can look at the entire arc — from someone who’s high on the craft, and who’s doing journey maps and personas. It has evolved hugely. It makes it much more complicated.”

For someone new coming into the industry, they probably won’t even have that experience and, to be fair, this is where experience in an immersive class or an internship can actually come in handy. Showing you exude the characteristics that Messina describes can actually be a great start.

“I love humanities people because they really understand story,” says Sciorra. “The combination of humanities and social sciences is a super powerful one. Sociology, anthropology, people who have the specific processes about understanding culture and people. At its base it’s somebody who has an understanding of developing solutions for people.”

Neeman expands on this, saying that he “focuses on people who can write well. Their understanding of language and structure lends itself well to what we do.” For him it boils down to people who can tell him stories. “They have to have intent in their writing. They have to have a way to get from point A to point B. There has to be some kind of closure. The best designers I’ve met are great storytellers.”

A combination of subject matter expertise and passion for story can go quite far to help someone find their footing and their first job in UX. Eric Blattberg, former journalist and graduate of General Assembly’s (GA) User Experience Immersion Program, found those two qualities to be the catalyst into his first success in the real world of experience design.

For Blattberg’s final project at General Assembly, they paired him with a Twitter television analysis company called Canvs.tv. “Given my background at Digiday, I had a real subject matter knowledge there that enabled me to quickly understand the product and the value proposition and actually do some good work for this client,” he says.

That work he did for his class ended up leading to freelance work with Canvs.tv and, eventually, to other projects. What worked here was Blattberg realizing he could apply his experience in and outside the GA class to turn an educational exercise into meaningful & successful stepping stone into his new career.

“How do you get experience without having any experience?” asks Blattberg. “In this case GA enabled me to point to say I did a real thing and it wasn’t a class project.”

The role of UX within companies has also changed, so anyone wanting a way in will have to approach it differently than most veterans. “For many years the role of UX in an organization was really about proving the value of UX. It was really about why do companies need to focus on UX and why do they need to take a user centric approach to design,” says Fox, who comes from a more traditional design background. “Where the industry is shifting is not in proving it’s value, but how can UX help define the direction that the business is going in.”

What Fox is alluding to is that, in the past, design has been a major focus for those hiring User Experience professionals, but as companies realize the impact that design can have on the bottom line, that experience needs to diversify. Designers need to demonstrate not just design knowledge, but the ability to apply design to solve business problems.

“People who can look at data and findings from research studies and who can direct that towards what the goals of the business are are critical to providing what the true solution is,” Fox adds.“You can get people who have more of a business background, an economics background, a finance background. I’m starting to see more people get hired who have those types of backgrounds than have legit design backgrounds.”

What this ultimately means is that aspiring UX professionals could come from a variety of backgrounds depending on what they want their specialization to be, but they all still need to have that burning need to be a part of a team that uses design to solve problems.

Speaking of teams, there is one aspect of background we haven’t touched on: collaboration.

“I look for unusual experiences,” says Neeman. “You hire a whole bunch of people that have a bunch of interesting experiences and they have something to contribute.”

Before he left Uber in early 2017, Messina worked with a team of people who had experience enough to claim bragging rights on their own. “We had three designers on the platform team. One guy designed iTunes. One guy was at Adobe. These are rock stars,” he says. But “Even though they are great at design, they are curious and care about people and have an understanding about having conversations and relating to the problems.”

The big takeaway there, even those who have already achieved success in the industry know enough to put their egos aside for the sake of collaboration because most of what we do evolves from conversations — and whether you’re junior or senior, we can all learn from each other.

In the article, What Software Teams Can Learn From Architects, Jude van Soldt draws parallels from her experience in the architecture world. She says, “A good architect is very user-focused, and not just on the needs of the person who’s taking classes or teaching at that school, but also on the neighbor who will walk past every day for the next 50 years and experience that school as an integral part of their city.” This type of holistic thinking is what truly makes great designers — regardless of what they’re designing. It’s exactly this type of thinking that we look for in people who’ll make great UX designers.

To Specialize or Not to Specialize

“One of the nice things about the UX community is we have that umbrella with visual designers, user researchers, UI designers.,” says Howard. “And we also have somewhere for the generalists. The people who do a little bit of everything which is an excellent and awesome thing to have.”

There certainly isn’t consensus on whether or not specialization is the way to go. There’s something to be said for focus — it allows you to really get to know a specific toolset. But it’s polarizing because companies are often looking for people who can do a little bit of everything in UX — that’s true both for large agencies and for startups.

“The market seems to want generalists, (because they seem cost effective, and because most operations are too small to support a team of specialists),” says Steve Krug, a veteran usability specialist and author of the influential book Don’t Make Me Think. “But I think it’s pretty hard to be really good at more than one of the many subspecialties. It’s a conundrum.”

But, if you do specialize, you must make sure you are literate in other areas of UX.

Steve Portigal, owner of Portigal Consulting, says “if you work in a specialized role, you must connect with people outside of your role. You must connect with the people who are not you. And, the more specialized your role is, the more broad your skillset must be.”

Those specialized roles vary not just by specific task (research vs. production vs. strategy), but also by the types of products you’re working on. Neeman points out that his experience is mainly in creating and evolving enterprise software, but that he’s “been on consulting projects where they’ve asked me to do a microsite and I didn’t know where to start.”

What he’s referring to is that there is a vast difference even in people who do similar jobs at different companies. “There are people who are really good at doing micro-sites and they are in UX,” Neeman continues, pointing to the fact that these require a lot of thinking when it comes branding and marketing strategy. Whereas, “enterprise systems don’t have a lot of visual design. The way I’m designing is atomic design-esque. A lot of modules that need to fit together like legos. Most visual designers don’t want to think like that — they want to think of things holistically.”

But there’s an argument to be made against specialization. Jared Spool compares the specific specialization in UX to other vocational fields:

“If doctors specialized the way that UX people specialize, you’d have one person who opens the wounds and another person who sutures it up. One person who takes the heart out and another person who puts it back in.”

He pushes the analogy even further saying that even doctors who specialize in a specific field, such as Cardiology or Pediatrics, all have the same foundation in medicine. “You start as a generalist in medicine,” says Spool. “But then you specialize.When you go to school to become a chef you learn how to do all the parts.” Why wouldn’t the same be true in UX?

Spool takes it even further, suggesting that maybe we’re looking at specialization in the wrong way. “I do believe there’s specialization in our field, but I think that specialization is only now emerging,” he says, echoing how Neeman described his own skillset. “That specialization is people who know how to design Electronic Health Records. Someone who knows how to recruit people for studies and meet regulatory and compliance rules inside the highly regulated field of financial investing, that someone is going to be much more valuable.”

One consistency that most experienced UX designers agree on is that, outside of the executional aspect of the job and being familiar with roles outside of your speciality, the soft skills play an acute role in a successful career.

As we mentioned in the previous articles in this series, software will change, but there are core skills and traits that you can use every day to develop yourself as a designer. In Skill Building For Design Innovators, Portigal outlines a great set of core skills central to the designer’s ability to create and communicate: Noticing, Listening, Understanding cultural context, Synthesizing, Wordsmithing, Drawing, and Embracing pop culture.

The Polarization of UX Education

There has been some form of UX education for many years and in many formats. From cognitive science, human factors and human computer interaction programs at universities like Carnegie Mellon, to more specific UX programs at SVA and Parsons School of Design. Today, the options also include in person immersive programs at General Assembly, in person bootcamps by effectiveUI or Cooper, and online destinations like Lynda, Bloc, Career Foundry, and others. Your options are expanding widely and, honestly, there’s no one right program for a person.

“You have to separate the world into academic schools and vocational schools,” says Jared Spool, who spent several years researching what approach would work best for his own school. “Academic schools that claim they have a vocation program don’t really. Vocational schools that claim to have an academic program don’t really.”

Most recently, the immersive programs that have sprung up have leaned more on the vocational side, inviting those interested in breaking into UX to attend five-day to 12-week intensive bootcamps. We covered a lot of the challenges of these immersive experiences in our piece on how the education of UX is broken. But to say these programs can’t be useful is unfair.

“I’ve been at it for about 30 years, and I’m not entirely sure I could break into the system myself today,” says Krug, adding that even if he wanted to learn this formally, “there were virtually no programs you could enroll in to learn about usability back then, with the exception of some Human Factors degrees.”

And even those degrees were broader than what these newer programs are offering. The fact is, the perception of these immersive experiences is way more negative than they actually are — from multiple sides of the industry.

“They expect of course to come out fully tooled to land a high paying UX job,” says Sciorra, from a recruiter’s standpoint. “Oftentimes the process is weak. And the output is unpolished.”

Similarly, Howard says that it reminds him “of what happened with the development community in the late 1990s early 2000s. Learn PERL in 21 days and suddenly you were a senior web developer.”

Even folks who have worked at General Assembly realize that it’s becoming a bit of an uphill battle. “GA has a bad reputation here [in Melbourne] because there were one or two students who came into the interview full of themselves thinking they knew everything and expecting a higher salary,” says Mark, who also became a teaching assistant at GA after she took the immersive class. “In Melbourne some companies are hesitant to hire GA students. There’s a bad taste, because there have been a couple of students that set a bad example.”

One other consistent challenge that these programs have is the balance of acknowledging the success stories from the ones that could drag the program’s reputation down. “I can tell that there are some people who are amazing and were meant to do this,” says Mark. “Then there are people where we’re like ‘oh, shit, how can we tell them they aren’t going to get a job and it doesn’t seem like they’re really getting it.’”

We saw this first hand when we created the curriculum for and taught General Assembly’s first 12 week UX immersive back in 2011. There were standout students who easily could have been hired after the program. But, this was because they’d been in complementary roles — graphic design, web design, library science, psychology — and had years of parallel foundation that helped them think like a designer. On the other hand, there were definitely students who were there chasing shiny pennies and some of them were not hirable after a 12-week program and no previous experience in design or a complementary field.

It’s important to acknowledge the negative perception those in the industry have of these programs because it’s a reality that graduates are, probably unfairly, judged by.

Our collective goal should be to figure out how to help people who would be great at UX find the best way in, and just because there are some challenges with immersive programs, it doesn’t mean they are bad.

In some cases, these programs are the only entry point for some people, especially if the company they want to work at or the country they want to work in puts a lot of value on education, degrees, and certifications.

“I knew I wasn’t going to go spend two years and $100,000 dollars getting a masters in interaction design,” says Blattberg, who as a tech reporter was familiar with many of the UX immersive programs. “I was just interested in moving a little faster and not spending as much money. I think it was helpful in enabling me to have the confidence to take that leap and quit my job.”

Blattberg’s success with his final project did lead to the launch of his career and after freelancing regularly for six months he eventually took a full-time job as a UX designer at a startup.

But he’s not necessarily prototypical of everyone who’s looking to get a job in the industry. The success rate of his class varied greatly.

“Some people got a job two, three, four weeks out of the program. Others were looking for a really long time,” he says. “We would have these fairly regular meetups every month or two. It’s tough to see folks being like yeah still sending out those resumes. Still looking. Or ‘second round, hope it goes well.’ Especially when two thirds are already employed. Especially when you think a lot of the folks are really talented.”

Part of the issue is that companies aren’t often willing to take a chance on less established talent. Blattberg also mentions being beaten out for a job by another UX designer with seven years of experience. But as the industry grows, that seven year veteran becomes harder to find and companies are faced with a real chicken or egg problem.

“There’s not enough seniors to fill the senior roles,” says Mark, whose experience at General Assembly brought her face-to-face with the companies that could potentially hire graduates. “Companies need to invest in juniors so that they can get that experience. Some of them understand the catch-22 but it’s hard to get them to come back and seek out these candidates.”

If they are looking for talent, and they have senior people to mentor greener people, companies do need to open their eyes to immersive programs. It’s the people they are hiring, not the program itself.

“I kind of feel the same way I feel about two day courses or 16 week bootcamps and certification training in SCRUM or agile,” says Howard. “When you leave, you’ll know a lot more about SCRUM, but you will in no way be ready to be the SCRUM master of your team.”

He goes on to say that “it’s the same about the UX bootcamps. Yeah, in your four or eight or 16 weeks, you will learn a shitload. You will learn to do a lot of things you couldn’t do when you went in, but you are not going to be suitable to jump into a senior role.”

That’s where the programs need to do a better job educating both the students, the companies and the recruiters.

Messaging about jumping into a UX career and setting unrealistic salary or seniority expectations are what a lot of companies hear from graduates, as we’ve heard from Mark and from Sciorra.

“I think these courses are good for exposing you to vocabulary. Language and vocabulary are incredibly important,” says Messina. “Learning how to talk in a way that suggests that you have some understanding of what’s going on is important. Coming out of the programs and presuming you know how to solve problems is like jumping into a relationship when you’re 13 and thinking you actually know how to get married.”

Even Spool agrees that an immersive course can be successful for someone. “When we find someone who’s hired a GA person who’s’ worked out, almost always it’s because of their pre-GA experience,” he says. “You can predict the success around a GA graduate by what they did before GA.“

Basically: you get out of it what you give.

One of the places these programs do fall short is teaching collaboration with other disciplines. Mostly because it would be impossible for a 12-week UX program to either work in concert with a similar program in development or design (those students are just learning too!) or it would be overwhelming to try and teach user-focused skills and the intricacies of technological limitations.

“What was most lacking about the GA program is collaboration with real developers,” says Blattberg. “You’re working in a silo and it’s difficult to know how to work with developers if you don’t have that development experience. I’m by no means a developer.”

Senior professionals in product development understand this and some instructors are trying to address this. Tami Reiss, taught Product Management at General Assembly and noted, “many of my students asked questions about who owned product UX design and definition on a team. The answer is ‘it depends and you have to work with different designers of different strengths’. It would have been good for them to get to work on a cross functional team as part of their coursework.”

As Spool and his colleagues created the program at Center Centre, they developed a system where students work directly with real clients and real development teams to get a product built. Every project students do “all have different real world constraints. And all of them have a development phase,” says Spool. “It’s all team based. They don’t only design something but they have to get through the development phase. We use the organization’s developers and each organization has a different process and the students have to adapt.”

Beyond Immersive Programs

Not all UX education programs are created equal. Before you sign up for a program, do the research. Consider the cost, impact to your lifestyle, experience of the instructors, how many times the program has been offered, and the outcomes that other students have experience.

Spool’s point about academic versus vocational degrees are an important consideration. UX is about solving practical problems and the skills needed to do it right can be taught in a program designed around moving a person directly into a job. “The reality of all this is that a vocational program’s purpose is to make people ready for a job,” he says, reaching back to where these types of teaching came from in the first place. “The first vocational trades were all around warcraft. They were around how do we get people who can make airplanes? How do we get people who can repair airplanes?”

One of the bigger challenges is distinguishing what the different benefits are for each type of program — particularly the benefits for you as a student. “The onus is on the programs to be clear and explain to students what is unique about your program.” says Craig M. MacDonald, an Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute in New York, where he also serves as the Program Coordinator for the Master’s in Information Experience Design. “If you want to be a person who can churn out beautiful wireframes, our program is not going to teach you to do that. We focus on broad-based projects, what it’s like to run through the full UX process. What is the area that speaks to you most to get into a career.”

The program at Pratt started in 2015 and has grown steadily, attracting students from all over the world. What makes the program different than other schools is Pratt’s access to programs that focus a combination of visual design, art and library science, according to MacDonald. Which is a stark contrast to a more computer science focused HCI program, which might appeal to a different type of student.

“We’re not saying we’re the one single place to come,” says MacDonald. “We’re not saying you’re going to come here and we put you through this conveyor belt where you’ll have this many projects at the end. You are going to find who you are as a professional.”

Bethany Riebock, a speech-language pathologist, practicing for 9 years, is a problem solver at heart. After discovering UX, she plotted a career pivot because she wanted a new challenge and more location independence. After exploring her education options, she decided that GA and GrowthX (among others) weren’t options because “I wanted to generate income while paying to study UX. I live in Menlo Park, and commuting 3+ hours round trip daily to a 9–5 bootcamp in downtown SF wasn’t feasible. Bloc is 100% remote and offers three course paces with mentoring.”

Shortly after enrolling in the Designer Track at Bloc, Bethany had some concerns. After discussing her concerns with leadership, she withdrew from the program, citing “poor student experience and disappointment with the curriculum.”

Many UX education programs haven’t had time to mature. They’re new and the logistics, curriculum, and instructors still need to evolve. Just like a minimum viable product (MVP) must launch and then be tweaked, the same holds true for these programs.

“I have seen so few examples of a really good undergraduate UX programs,” says Abby Covert, the Staff Information Architect at Etsy. Covert has taught at a range of programs including General Assembly, SVA and the UX-focused school Center Centre, the latter of which is still in its first cohort of six students.

Covert goes on to describe the Center Centre program as a combination of what she likes about graduate programs and what she liked about teaching at General Assembly in the early days. “When I first started working at GA, the names of people were extraordinary,” she says. “Everyone I taught with or in the same building as had a decade of experience, speaking credentials and were writing books and articles.”

Similarly, Center Centre is interested in providing education by the best of the best in a program that breaks down UX in a very consumable manner. “Each part of the UX umbrella is broken down and taught by an industry expert but not in a long-form way,” says Covert. “For the industry expert that comes in, it’s two days of intensive workshop training. In terms of caliber of faculty, it’s even better than GA was back then, just because it’s not about location. They fly people in from all over the world to teach there.”

With it’s two year program, Center Centre takes a different approach than most other programs. “When we think about what to put into our courses, every aspect is based on what do we think a hiring manager needs,” says Spool, the institute’s founder. After years of research into how to train User Experience professionals, he says that what they heard over and over again was students rarely came to interviews with any real world experience.

“If you go to an academic school and you’re an A student, you’re experience is that you’re an A student. All you’ve done is done a project and gotten an A,” says Spool. “What we heard from hiring managers is they hire these people, they give them this project, they hand it in, and the developers look at it and say we can’t do this.“

His point being that most people new to the industry haven’t been through the other side of the process, the build, and often consider handing in the wireframes or the designs the end of the process. Many of us learned that this waterfall model didn’t work during dot-com 1.0, but without having been through that side or been taught that, it’s very easy to believe that the finished “deliverable” is the end of the process.

That collaboration with developers is definitely an important factor in the real world and many programs, in addition to General Assembly, simply can’t accommodate that due to how the programs or schools are structured. They need to find alternate ways to ensure that students aren’t learning while only wearing UX goggles.

MacDonald acknowledges that the collaboration with developers is a struggle that Pratt faces. “The hardest part of collaboration is that students say ‘I wish you’d taught us how to work with developers,’” says MacDonald. “But we don’t have a CS program or an engineering program. The way we try to get around it really, is we try to encourage students to get internships. The only way to do that is to do it in a real setting.”

To start combatting this, Pratt did recently start a Front-End Development program.

Nitin Sampathi graduated in 2015 with a BA in graphic design. After a year of working in graphic and motion design, Sampathi started researching UX programs and found the MICA graduate program in UX. He selected this program because it allowed him to keep working while studying. After being in the program for six months, the benefits to working while going to school are clear. “There have been a couple times where I’ve learned about a type of deliverable in class and applied it directly to my job the next day,” he says.

However, because his class is the first cohort, there were a number of logistical issues with the software, curriculum, and the types of instructors. Sampathi notes, “all the instructors have been industry professionals, but not all of them are educators. I think you can tell the difference between the two from the way the projects/assignments are set up, the topics/prompts of those assignments, and the way the instructors communicate learning outcomes. It’s hard to put into words but it’s something you can just tell, educators just have that knack.”

Each of these individuals did all the right things. They sought out education, in their case formal education, and spent a lot of time researching programs to identify the program that was right for their unique scenario. They also recognized that completing a program would only be the starting point. During and after their education program, they created a portfolio, supplemented their learning with self study, and got creative about standing out and finding a job.

The Search for Mentorship

Dan received this email on October 28, 2011 from a woman who had attended a talk he’d given at General Assembly about two weeks before. Unlike many emails we receive from prospective UX designers, this was a very well researched, thought out and action-oriented email.

Two weeks later they met for coffee and discussed what she wanted to do in the world of UX.

A month later, she came on board as an intern, a paid 40-hour a week endeavor that was meant to (and did eventually) lead to a full-time position.

We use this example not to say that reaching out to a potential mentor will result in a job, but rather to demonstrate the power that well thought out communication can have. We take this industry very seriously and we want very much to work with others who share that value — we can disagree on many things when it comes to the details of design, but passion is one of the most important things we all agree is a must.

Unlike the email above, most of the emails or tweets we receive are questions like “how can I get into UX” or “how do I create a portfolio if I don’t have a UX job right now.”

General questions like that are a non-starter and a clear sign that you don’t have what it takes to be successful in UX.

Success in UX is rooted in a strong, solution-oriented mindset and getting into it involves that line of thinking as well. Show us that you have that curiosity and, most likely, you’ll have a more interesting and useful conversation.

And know what you want from the mentorship when you finally do reach out. Start with the solution to the problem. The chances of you receiving a reply with increase exponentially.

“Asking someone to be your mentor can be perceived as selfish,” decrees Mona Patel, Founder & CEO of Motivate Design. “Asking people to give you indefinite one-on-one attention isn’t the way to go. Don’t just ask to pick my brain.”

So what should designers do? Patel suggests that you don’t try have have such formal picture of what mentorship is. “Keep it casual, meet people where they’re at, be more giving and don’t just go in with an attitude of ‘help me’.”

Mentorship shouldn’t actually feel like a formal thing, especially since it can easily evolve into a friendship. “I’ve had many mentors who actually never knew they were mentoring me,” says Patel. It doesn’t have to be a formal thing. Identify people that resonate with you, that challenge you, and devour their content.

“It’s all about having the right connection. It’s kinda like dating,” echoes Kristin Mark. “The best kind of mentorships are the one when they’re not forced. When you’re reaching out to people to be your mentor, it’s not easy because you want that organic connection.” Mark goes on to reinforce that you need to “really think about why you’re going to this person. What you want out of it. Also, what can you give? What can the mentor get out of it?”

Luciano Vizza, a self-taught UX designer, echoes the problem that people have when trying to learn UX, “there’s so much content online, it’s easy to get lost, and that’s when you get frustrated”. His recommendation is that you have to be disciplined. One way to do this is to “find a focus” as he says. For example, Vizza chose specific topics he wanted to learn about and immersed himself in it, such as devouring everything he could find about user on-boarding through Samuel Hulick’s website and resource, User Onboarding. Not a formal mentor, but Vizza smartly sought out knowledge from an expert without taking up any of that expert’s time!

Another tip that Patel has is to look at the people closest to you. “When deciding where they may want to work, designers need to consider who will influence them in those early career years. Your boss raises you. You will be influenced by the people who raise you in your career.”

Part of UX is figuring things out. It’s about problem solving, experimenting, being proactive, and taking chances. Part of good UX is knowing your audience, and if you’re emailing a vague question such as those, or another favorite “will you mentor me” — it shows that you don’t think through the details, didn’t do the research on the person you are talking to.

Mentorship can really and should come from more than just the experienced people in the field. Sometimes we are the wrong people to help. “The best advice I’ve ever seen about getting advice about how to swing a career in UX (which I do get asked a lot) was in a blog post a few years ago,” says Krug, referencing this post on Giving Less Advice. “Basically, the author said ‘Don’t ask for this advice from senior people in the field, because their experience is out of date.’ Instead he suggested asking advice from people who were in your position four or five years ago at most.”

This view is actually becoming more and more widespread in the industry. It’s not so much that the people have been doing it for so long have lost touch — our job is to continually be educating ourselves about new trends in how people interact with systems, devices, etc — but rather that the way the industry is viewed and how it’s evolved puts our perspective in a very different place.

“One of the struggles is when prospective designers ask the senior designers who’ve made [a career of it] what the right answer to success is. A lot of times, we can’t tell them. I can’t even explain why I’m successful sometimes other than it’s just the way my brain is wired,” says Neeman, suggesting that those of us who have been in the industry for years have very different context because of how much the the path has changed.

As Blattberg mentions about his former classmates getting together regularly, peer mentorships and check-ins can be just as valuable as reaching out the veterans.

Most of us want to help. It’s in all of our best interests help UX designers grow into more senior roles. The more of us, the better. That’s why many of us are so passionate about producing content and programs that can help people en masse. Sarah does this actively through her weekly UX newsletter, UX videos on YouTube, and online UX courses. Dan does this on his podcast Story in a Bottle by reaching out to other people in the tech world to understand their approach, points-of-view, and experience and lessons on how they got started and what keeps them going.

So how can you stand out? Ask a concise well-thought out question in a few sentences. Demonstrate that you’ve done your homework. And make sure your question isn’t going to require that person write you back a long answer! But please, don’t email someone and ask if you can have a call or get coffee and have zero agenda or purpose.

How Candidates are Vetted

Many recruiters and automated job sites evaluate candidates using a litmus test. In other words, they force requirements without understanding the context of the candidate. Don’t want to upload or link to your portfolio at the time you apply to the job on the big job site? No degree in Human Factors or HCI? Sorry, you definitely won’t be considered.

In product design, we say the UX is not just the website, it’s the sum of all the little interactions and influence points that someone has with your brand — emails you send them, their experience with customer service, content on your social media.

Similarly, we should be looking at you as the sum of your whole. Judging you on just one part of your experience or training isn’t fair to you or, actually, to us if we really want to find the right person. Which is why it’s fundamentally not fair, for example, to completely disqualify someone who has gone to a bootcamp or immersive program.

Dave Malouf, a veteran design leader, has experienced this first hand having been a candidate as well as the hiring manager throughout his career. Instead of trying to apply a litmus test to candidates, Malouf prefers to collect all the relevant information about a candidate so he can make an informed decision that’s based on the individual’s entire makeup, not just one part of their experience.

Here’s an example, imagine you’re at an enterprise company and you’re hiring a junior designer. One applicant is self taught, has a graphic design, background, and startup experience. Many hiring managers would disqualify the applicant based on this experience and education. However with Malouf’s approach, the candidate would still be in consideration. As he noted, “so they don’t have enterprise experience”. You have to look at each candidate holistically, as Malouf says “I’m constantly taking stock of all the little details so I can make an informed decision after getting to know the whole candidate”. Now, imagine with this same candidate the portfolio ends up being a bunch of pretty pictures with no context and not story. Malouf says “that says it all, it shows me their maturity as a designer, and I move on to the next candidate”.

You need to show the people doing the UX hiring that you not only have the skills but can also identify, and effectively communicate, how your skills translate to the position you’re applying for.

Just as we do on any design project, before we start designing, we have to know the audience or customer. We don’t just start designing. In the same way, designers who are looking for jobs should not just blast out the same resume, cover letter, and portfolio to every position they want to apply for. Everything you submit must be tailored to each unique position.

One example Malouf gave was the website of a British copywriter, Joe Coleman. The website is very simple at first glance, some friendly intro text to help you get to know Joe and then a slider. The slider is the genius part though, it changes the copy to be more or less of a hard sell based on the slider position.

This isn’t to say that designers need to build out a complex website. It could be as simple as having one Keynote file that you constantly pull from and re-mix based on each request for work samples that you get. This is exactly what Sarah does. She always tailors which pieces to to potential clients. But she doesn’t just tailor the visuals, she also tailors the story about her role, the process, and outcomes for each project.

Beyond vetting for experience, what other vetting happens? Malouf says that a large part of it is social vetting. By this he means relying on the social networks to find out who’s worked with someone before. If he’s serious about a candidate, he will look them up on LinkedIn, see if he knows anyone that’s worked with them in the past, and see what that person has to say.

Where to Look for Jobs

When asked where hiring managers and recruiters look for candidates, a central theme was that they all start with niche, trusted communities. Here are some of the places that are starting points:

• Slack communities such as Designer Hangout are a great starting point because there is trust and you get to know people based on your interactions with them.
• Niche jobs boards such as IXDA, UX Jobs Board, and Just UX Jobs.
• And finally, reaching into the networks of their peers and colleagues.

It’s important to note a key place where hiring managers are not looking for candidates. Dribbble. This isn’t a criticism of Dribbble. It’s about how people are using it. Many designers use Dribbble as an art gallery for the final product instead of a place to showcase the full design process. We’re not alone in this observation.

One of the best articles we found is by Paul Adams, VP of Product at Intercom. In his article, The Dribbilisation of Design, Adams writes, “too many designers are designing to impress their peers rather than address real business problems.” This, in turn, has lead to many designers focusing on the end result. Adams continues, “the worse applications sent in flat PNGs or PDFs of full wireframes. No articulation of the problem being solved, nor the business and technical constraints. No context.”

In contrast, he says the best applicants can “show their thought process. Sketches. Diagrams. Pros and cons. Real problem. Tradeoffs and solutions. Prototypes that illustrate interaction and animation. Things that move, change and animate. Things that use real data.”

Rooting Your Expectations in Reality

“The best jobs never appear on job boards; they are through word of mouth,” Says Patrick Neeman on Usability Counts. “It’s usually discovered through endless hours of networking or because recruiters found us after we promoted ourselves. Normally, these jobs are through personal or employee referral.”

One of the big issues here is that people wanting to come into this world rarely understand what UX is really all about. Honestly, even those of us who have been in it forever have seen the industry expand to make it broader than it should be.

“The field still doesn’t have enough definition around it,” says Neeman. “The personal referrals are priceless. We go with people we trust, even more so than other competencies.”

It’s certainly how we both found our earliest jobs in UX and how we continue to do so. Dan got his start when his grad school professor and digital media pioneer, Elizabeth Osder, referred him to an information architecture job at iXL, a large web-consultancy that exploded in the dot-com boom. She was VP of Media & Entertainment there at the time.

Similarly, Sarah got her start when a former boss handed her the book Information Architecture For The Worldwide Web because he thought she’d be good at it. A year later, he hired her as a web designer at a large Fortune 500 company where she got to see the impact of UX in a large organization. This also sparked Sarah’s interest in UX and motivated her to teach herself UX and develop her first freelance design business in 2003.

While the industry was younger then and there were far fewer of us, Neeman’s advice rings just as true then as it does now. Today, perhaps more than ever, there are many resources at your disposal to start showcasing yourselves. But you need to be willing to do the work.

When Kristin Mark realized she couldn’t do another session being a TA at General Assembly due to visa issues in Australia, she hit the pavement hard. “I trolled people on LinkedIn. I went to meetups. I talked to anyone I could,” she says. After the relatively short time of five weeks, she found a job as a UX Designer at Bourne Digital through a meetup. And it was thanks to the education she’d gotten: “I did everything that GA told me to do.”

There’s no one size fits all for getting a UX education, getting hired, practicing UX, or being a leader. Eliza Doton, a UX Designer who took a 12-week course at GA says, “When I first started out, I thought there was a checklist of things. In my prior psychology classes there was a prescribed way to write a research report for example. My Bachelor in Psychology was based around the idea that there was ‘one right way’ to do things.”

After getting a job at an education company and working as a UX designer, Doton noted “the reason I love this industry is that it’s full of people always learning and evolving their skillset. Nobody knows everything.” This was a powerful realization for her because she often questioned her competency and that initially affected her confidence as a designer. “I may be sitting beside someone who’s been doing it (UX) for far more years, but often times I know more than them about a software or new take on a method.”

It’s those people sitting next to you, though, who can teach you soft skills you may not even know you don’t possess.

Early in his career, Howard says he quickly ascended to ladder to be the technical director at a startup “I was completely incompetent to be a manager or leader in any respect,” says he says. “I’d never worked in that context before. I’d never worked with good managers before in any meaningful way. This was a skill I didn’t have. I wasn’t a good leader.”

As he progressed through his next few jobs, though, he realized that he was learning these through context from his peers.

“Later on in life I worked with some different kinds of people and there are things called listening and talking to your staff and all these things that you do when you’re a manager and understanding that your job is to get everyone else to do their best,” he says. “That’s stuff you can learn in your off-time but being mentored by someone is better. it’s not something that is trivial to learn. It is a skill that needs time and practice for you to get good at. I wish more people spent more time learning that.”

In Conclusion

How do you break into a field that is ever changing? How do you find your spot in an industry that has such confusion across the candidates, companies, and recruiters? How do you navigate the uncertainty and the unknown?

The truth is that you don’t break into UX. The best UX designers get excited about the journey — because the education of a designer is never over.

But there is one catch, do not let yourself get paralyzed by the massive amount of information and resources available about UX right now. Why? Because if you try to spend all your time learning about UX, you take away from the valuable lessons that can be learned from just doing.

Don’t overthink it. Don’t get hung up on what software you should be using, or what research method to use, or what design process you should follow.

Our best advice is to just start. Start doing. Start making. Start looking around you, spotting problems, solving them, and practicing how to think and how to do.

And the comforting thing is that people will appreciate the fact that you care. “One of the things that’s cool about the design world is that if you do good work and you’re able to tell a story about it, it doesn’t matter what your degree is in, it doesn’t matter where you went to school, people will hire you,” say Neeman.

Getting a job in UX is only the beginning. The senior designers of tomorrow will be the junior ones who today, remain humble, never stop learning, stay curious, embrace their role as an advocate, and consciously make an effort to collaborate with and learn from other disciplines.

This is the third article in a series about the state of the UX eco-system:
1. The UX of Learning UX is Broken
2. The UX of Hiring for UX Positions
3. The UX of Getting Started in UX

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dan Maccarone is the co-founder of Charming Robot, a digital product design agency in NYC. He also hosts the podcast Story in a Bottle, chronicling the stories of tech and media professionals. Follow him on Twitter @danmaccarone.

Sarah Doody is a UX Designer & Entrepreneur in NYC. She teaches people how to think like a designer through her UX courses, weekly UX newsletter, and her YouTube channel. Follow her on Twitter @sarahdoody.

I hate the term “unicorn.” Seriously hate. And I’m not talking about mythical beasts leaping over rainbows. Everyone loves those. I’m talking about a much more dangerous and rare animal.

So many startups we talk to are looking to find that one person who will solve all of their problems. The one person who can strategize, design both the experience and the visual identity, code the whole damn thing, and have it all done before the investor meetings start next month. And since it’s one person, their budget won’t take a hit.

The whole idea of hiring a sole person to tackle all of these pieces of a product is not only misguided, it’s dangerous.

I once considered myself a unicorn (again, not the rainbow kind). Back in the dot-com 1.0 world. I thought I did it all: HTML, JavaScript, SQL, PHP, Photoshop and Visio. I attempted to chip in on every step of a project, and, even with Web technology being significantly more limited back then, there were always people better than me in all areas — details they knew, experience they had — because they focussed so intently on that area.

In the years since, as I’ve been fortunate to work on some incredible businesses. I’ve collaborated closely with amazing people on all sides of a project — experts in their fields that interject insights and experience to create products that launched better because of it.

At the same time, I’ve watched startup after startup fail because they find people who claim to do everything and do it faster and cheaper. In the end, failure became inevitable because the initial product ended up being merely passable, while the competition soared. Often these products run into two distinctly problematic factions:

1. The slickly coded product that actually works, but falls short on a design that actually solves the original problem, or
2. The beautifully designed product that would make a great wall hanging, but either lacks the functionality needed to solve the problem or is just plain buggy.

I’m sympathetic to the limited budgets that young startups face, and the need to make smart decisions as to how those precious dollars are spent. Allocating dollars is challenging, but thinking short and long-term is critical for founders. Building a product that is mediocre and must be rebuilt later always leads to wasted money in the long-run. It also often ends up spitting out flawed analytical data that is critical to evolving and improving your product.

Honed experience, on the other hand, almost always breeds a better product for launch and allows you to grow effectively.

That’s not to say startups should drop gobs of money on agencies; my company (Charming Robot) certainly speaks to a lot of startups looking to launch their initial product that we turn down — largely because they don’t need a team like us yet. While agencies like mine bring a lot of experience to the table, sometimes a lean team of 1. a product visionary /subject matter expert, 2. a smart UX / visual designer and 3. an experienced developer can get a first version out to the market faster, find traction, and then evolve the product with a more robust team externally or internally. But each launch teammate should bring veteran experience in their core expertise. That will allow for the best initial outcome.

A rabbit hole

The problem with unicorns is they don’t really exist — either kind — and hunting them down will inevitably result in wasted time, wasted money, and a rabbit hole of disappointment.

Great products come with collaboration, managed schedules, smart debates, and focussed features.

If you hire a “unicorn” from day one, you’re most likely going to miss out on strategy conversations and instead will end up with a mediocre, feature-bloated product that launches late because it was mis-scoped, mismanaged and shoddily put together.

Technology changes so quickly these days, and how people use it evolves just as fast. Someone who is focussed on exposing themselves to everything won’t get the details right; they won’t have the ability to keep their finger to the pulse of what is actually happening. The UX will be unoriginal, the design will probably lack strategy, and the code will be inefficient.

Unicorns sound sexy, mystical, and perfect for any company looking to be lean, but they belong on t-shirts — not in your company.

This piece was originally published on WeWork’s Creator.

Stop Looking for Unicorns was originally published in Your Robot Brain on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For almost a decade now, I’ve been privileged to count myself among the people in tech who enjoy the crossover into media and Gawker was at the center of that overlap. Whether it be their roof parties on Elizabeth Street, the spontaneous gatherings at The Magician and Tom & Jerry’s (or even the Gawker TV Trivia Nights at my old bar, Destination), it was a ubiquitous presence.

Plenty has been written about why it died. There’s no need for me to address that, nor am I the right person to do so.

Instead, I‘d like to celebrate the extraordinary people that Gawker has set loose in the media world who are, for the most part, making journalism a better, more innovative place — especially at a time when the media industry is crumbling around itself.

I’m proud to call many of them friends.

Over the past two years, I’ve spoken to almost 100 tech and media people on my podcast, Story in a Bottle. Many of them have touched Gawker in some way or another, but there are four who were there, on the ground. So, let those who helped shape and shift the future of the industry tell the tale way better than I ever could.

Elizabeth Spiers (or download on iTunes)
As the founding editor of Gawker, Elizabeth changed the face of writing for the web. She established one of the best-known, snarky voices on the internet, posting quickly and fastidiously, for only $1200 per month. Since, she’s become the editor-in-chief of the New York Observer and now runs her own content-oriented company, The Insurrection.

Lockhart Steele (or download on iTunes)
Though he’d been passionate about content since elementary school, Lock really began breaking boundaries and formats at Gawker, in addition to his successful self-published-turned-professionally-published book about jam band Phish (the Pharmer’s Almanac). His experience at the blog network lead to him ultimately commit to his vision with Curbed, which sold to Vox in 2014. Since then, he’s continued to exceed the limitations of the status quo in business, publishing, and writing. He attributes much of his progress to the people — the investors, mentors, partners, and teams — who have steered him in key moments of his career and ultimately, whose collaboration have created that “secret sauce” which is so important to the evolutions of innovative products.

Richard Blakeley (or download on iTunes)
Blakeley’s career has always been about pushing the boundaries of content. As Head of the Gawker Media Video Department from 2006 through 2011, he’s pioneered the importance of a voice in video and branded content. Since Gawker, he has founded The Webutante Ball, helped shaped the digital strategy of Thrillist and People.com and now is the Senior Director of Product at SheKnows.com, the largest destination for women’s content on the internet.

Mark Graham (or download on iTunes)
The world of Gawker editors shifted hands a few times in the 14 years of it’s existence. In 2007, Nick Denton even offered it to Graham, only to rescind it later claiming that Mark wouldn’t be a good fit for the job and Denton eventually (and temporarily) took on the job himself. But for Graham, his time at Gawker really helped shape his view of media and what it could be. Since then, he has way moved on to being the editor-in-chief of The New York Post’s Decider.com. He also likes Bud Lite’s Lime-a-Rita’s, which I will forever hold against him.

So many other guests are have their own Gawker links, just highlighting the amazing reach and impact it truly had on its readers and community. To give you a sense, of the 90-something people we’ve interviewed on Story in a Bottle, Gawker has written at one point or another about almost half of them. Here they are: Rick Webb, Brooke Hammerling, Scott Beale, Rex Sorgatz, Soraya Darabi, Steve Martocci, Lindsay Kaplan, Caroline Waxler,Chris O’Leary, Caroline McCarthy, David Kassan, Rafat Ali, Gavin Purcell,Kate Lee, Allison Mooney, Kevin Kearney, Aubrey Sabala, Seth Porges, Fred Graver, Mark Mangan, Dennis Crowley, Michael Pryor, Erick Schonfeld,Maya Baratz, Jay Parkinson, Chris Messina, Hilary Mason, Jessica Beck,Rachel Sklar, Tony Hendra, Meghan (Keane) Graham, Albert Wegner, Dan Frommer, Andrea Syrtash, Wesley Verhoeve, Allison Schrager, Stephen Elliot, Jenny Boylan, Blogologues, and Maddy Maxey.

Thanks for the 14 years of coverage, Gawker. It wasn’t always pretty, I didn’t always agree, but I’m really glad you existed and the world of media and tech is all the better for it.