Everywhere I look, I see headlines about AI.

AI will change how we work.
AI will 10x productivity.
AI will replace entire workflows.

And I honestly believe a lot of that.

But as a design leader, I’ll say the quiet part out loud:

AI is about to push a lot of design organizations backwards in design maturity.

Not because designers suddenly got worse. And not because we lack ambition.

But because AI introduces a level of speed and ambiguity that most organizations simply aren’t built to handle.

And I’m already seeing the cracks.

The Illusion of Progress

Over the past year, I’ve watched teams rush to “use AI” everywhere without redefining anything around it.

No rethinking of process.
No recalibration of quality bars.
No clarity around decision ownership.

Just… raw speed.

Output is skyrocketing. Screens are multiplying. Prototypes are everywhere.

But thinking? That’s nowhere to be found.

I feel like everyone is sprinting as fast as possible in the wrong direction!

When everything can be generated instantly, the temptation is to skip the slow parts. The uncomfortable parts. The parts that actually require judgment.

• Framing the problem
• Doing the research
• Sitting in ambiguity
• Exploring multiple paths

Those are the muscles that define mature design organizations. And they’re the first muscles to atrophy when speed becomes the only metric that matters.

What is Design Maturity?

For context, Design Maturity is really two interconnected pillars:

• The level of Design Thinking knowledge and skill across every employee — not just designers, but PMs, engineers, marketers, and executives.
• How well Design Thinking is integrated into the core ways the organization operates, makes decisions, and builds products.

You can have brilliant designers who live and breathe empathy, iteration, and prototyping, but if design is still siloed and treated like a final coat of paint, maturity stays low. The opposite is just as true: you can have design perfectly embedded in every process, but if the team lacks real depth in Design Thinking, you’re just going through the motions.

There’s a few different Design Maturity models — I prefer to use InVision’s 5 Levels model because it’s simple and backed by research.

They surveyed over 2,200 companies worldwide and published their findings in The New Design Frontier, a comprehensive report examining design’s impact on business outcomes.

Design maturity encompasses the processes, tools, and methodologies used to create products, services, and experiences that meet customer needs and drive business success. Achieving a high level of design maturity is crucial for companies seeking to differentiate themselves in a competitive market and deliver exceptional user experiences.

The concept of design maturity is built around the idea that organizations progress through various stages as they develop their design capabilities.

As a design leader, I’ve always built design maturity into my yearly strategies and goals for my Design orgs and teams.

Understanding these stages and the characteristics that define them is essential for businesses looking to improve their design practices and reap the benefits of a mature design organization.

Why Design Maturity Is Going Backwards

Here’s the paradox: AI collapses the time between idea and artifact.

That feels like progress.

But maturity isn’t measured by how fast you produce artifacts. It’s measured by how well you define the problem before you produce anything.

When everything can be generated instantly:

• Junior designers start relying on prompts instead of judgment
• Senior designers get pulled into production firefighting instead of shaping strategy
• Craft becomes optional instead of intentional

And then leadership adds fuel to the fire.

“Do more with less.”
“We don’t need as much headcount now.”
“AI can handle that.”

AI shifts from being a multiplier of experience to a substitute for it.

You’ll see design systems get bypassed, then standards start to loosen, and consistency will erode. Eventually design craft becomes optional.

What used to require thoughtful cross-functional collaboration turns into a throughput problem.

And the scary part? It doesn’t feel like failure. It feels like acceleration.

The Real Risk

Every major upgrade in the designer toolkit promised us the world.

Faster prototyping.
No-code builders.
Design systems.

And each one did provide some real efficiencies… but only when paired with stronger thinking. Without that discipline, tools amplify chaos.

AI is the most powerful amplification tool we’ve ever had. It doesn’t just make us faster. It makes us instantly productive.

And instant productivity is intoxicating.

The real risk isn’t that AI will replace designers. It’s that designers will slowly drift back into the role of fast-producing mockup monkeys.

We fought for years to move design upstream. To be strategic partners. To shape product vision instead of polishing it.

And if we aren’t careful, AI will quietly push us downstream again, because when output is cheap, strategy and thoughtfulness looks slow.

And in most organizations, slow gets cut.

How to Avoid Becoming a Mockup Monkey

In order to avoid becoming a mockup monkey, your Design org/team needs to be disciplined enough to:

• Slow down before diving into AI
• Redefine quality standards in an AI-native world
• Protect research time
• Teach judgment, not just prompting
• Use AI to expand exploration — not replace thinking

Maturity will show up in restraint.

It will show up in leaders who say, “Yes, we can generate that in 10 seconds, but should we?”

It will show up in teams that treat AI as a collaborator, not a crutch.

Closing Thoughts as a Design Leader

This year, I’m not measuring success by how much AI my team uses.

I’m measuring it by:

• How clearly we frame problems
• How deeply we understand customers
• How intentionally we craft solutions
• How well design influences the business

AI isn’t the enemy.

But unmanaged speed is.

And if we don’t deliberately evolve our processes, standards, and expectations, design maturity will take a step backwards before it ever moves forward again.

The teams that win won’t be the fastest.

They’ll be the most disciplined.

Why Design Maturity Matters in the Age of AI was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

40% of tech companies today treat design like an afterthought. This guide challenges that mindset. It takes you on a journey from that old worldview to a world where design becomes the strategic engine of innovation. Using proven maturity models, it it helps you assess where you are, uncover what’s holding you back, and level up design across your entire organization.

I recently spoke with a design leader at a top EV company, and I asked him about Design Maturity at his company.

He paused, then asked “what do you mean by ‘Design Maturity’?”

My jaw hit the floor. I literally had to explain it to him. And that’s a huge problem.

I think the bigger problem is that this one moment captures the current state of the entire tech industry.

This data proves my point: InVision surveyed over 2,200 companies worldwide and found that over 40% are still stuck at Level 1 — the “make it pretty” stage, where design is basically an afterthought.

Too many leaders — design leaders included — want to champion design, but they’re paralyzed. They don’t have a roadmap. They’re still trying to figure out AI, let alone what real design maturity looks like at scale.

And that’s exactly why I’m writing this. Because I’m sick and tired of watching design get treated like a final coat of paint instead of the strategic engine it should be.

If you agree and want to learn how design can become a strategic driver at scale in any organization, then keep reading. I’ll walk you through what design maturity really means, where most organizations are stuck, and how to actually move the needle in yours.

Because I’ve found that when design maturity is high, the entire company levels up. Not just the design team.

What is Design Maturity?

I’ve spent years watching companies and teams wrestle with it, and here’s the truth: Design Maturity isn’t about how pretty your designs look or how many designers you hire.

To me, Design Maturity comes down to two interconnected pillars:

• The level of design thinking knowledge and skill across every employee (not just designers, but PMs, engineers, marketers, and executives) should include strong workshop facilitation to guide teams through collaborative problem solving and alignment, empathy to deeply understand user needs and emotions, problem framing to turn vague challenges into clear human-centered statements, divergent ideation to generate many creative possibilities quickly and without judgment, convergent decision-making to narrow ideas using evidence and user testing, and rapid prototyping and iteration to build and refine low-fidelity versions early and often
• How well design thinking is integrated into the core ways the organization operates, makes decisions, and builds products

You can have brilliant designers who live and breathe empathy, iteration, and prototyping, but if design is still siloed and treated like a final coat of paint, maturity stays low. The opposite is just as true: you can have design perfectly embedded in every process, but if the team lacks real depth in design thinking, you’re just going through the motions.

I’ve seen companies where both pillars are strong. And something powerful happens.

Design gets woven deeply into the DNA of the organization by shaping strategy, culture, decisions, and the products. For example, the way Apple embeds design into every hardware and software decision, how Airbnb rebuilt its entire business around user trust and experience, or how Tesla reimagines the car as a continuously evolving product. These organizations listen to users relentlessly, solve real problems with curiosity, iterate fearlessly, and treat design as a strategic partner driving innovation — not a support function polishing the surface.

Sure, this doesn’t happen overnight. For most large organizations, design maturity is a long, epic journey as you move up each level.

The great news is that design can be applied to all organizations, from small startups, massive corporations, nonprofits, you name it. Everyone moves at their own pace, hits different milestones, sometimes even goes backwards. And that’s okay.

The point isn’t perfection. It’s progress.

So if you’re wondering where your company stands right now, the clearest way is to look at a Design Maturity model. They’re like maps for the journey ahead. Let’s dive into those next…

Design Maturity Models

Just like any other type of methodology, it’s really helpful to utilize a model to understand how it applies to you and your organization.

With that said, there’s quite a few Design Maturity models that I’ll walk you through.

Review the models and pick the best one that meets your needs. Once you found the right one, I highly recommend you spend some time to fully understand the model and each level of maturity. And then you can use it to assess your organization’s maturity level and then map out the necessary steps to guide your organization in scaling up the Design practice.

Design Maturity Model by InVision

• Overview: A five-level framework that ranges from superficial visual design to strategic, business-driving design
• Who should use it: Tech leaders and product orgs that want a simple but research-backed roadmap for maturing design across product and business functions
• When it works best: When you’re trying to assess where design fits from basic UI work to strategic innovation within a company

From my perspective, I give this model an A+ and highly recommend this Design Maturity model by InVision (even if the company is now defunct) because it’s simple to use and backed by tons of research.

They surveyed over 2,200 companies worldwide and published their findings in The New Design Frontier, a comprehensive report examining design’s impact on business outcomes.

It’s not terribly surprising that they found that 41% of companies surveyed are stuck at Level 1. I’m more surprised that the number isn’t actually higher.

Here’s a quick overview of each stage of the InVision Design Maturity Model:

• Level 1: Producers — Design is purely visual and superficial. It’s seen as “making things look pretty” at the end of a project. Work is siloed, inconsistent, and focused only on the UI
• Level 2: Connectors — Design becomes a formal process. Teams start collaborating more, using common tools, and incorporating basic user research. There is a shift toward creating consistent user experiences.
• Level 3: Architects — Design is integrated into the product cycle. It moves beyond the design team and becomes a shared responsibility. This level usually features the birth of a Design System to scale efficiency.
• Level 4: Scientists — Design is data-driven and hypothesis-led. Teams use A/B testing, analytics, and sophisticated user research to prove value. Design success is directly linked to business KPIs (like conversion or retention).
• Level 5: Visionaries — Design drives business strategy. It’s used to explore new markets, define the long-term product vision, and shape the company’s DNA. At this level, design is a proven contributor to the bottom line.

Stages of UX Maturity by Nielsen Norman Group

• Overview: The Stages of UX Maturity from Nielsen Norman Group is one of the most well-known Design Maturity models that utilizes a six-stage model that charts the evolution of UX practices from nonexistent to deeply user-driven
• Who should use it: UX and product leaders aiming to evaluate and strengthen user-experience capabilities across processes, tools, culture, and strategy
• When it works best: Best for orgs focusing specifically on UX adoption rather than design broadly, especially where UX practices are inconsistent or nascent

I give this UX Maturity model a B because it’s detailed, UX-centric model that’s excellent for understanding your UX capabilities within your company, but I don’t really recommend it because it’s too narrow for most modern design orgs that encompass both UI and UX, and even CX.

Here’s a quick overview of the 6 stages of UX maturity:

1. Absent — UX is ignored or nonexistent
2. Limited — UX work is rare, done haphazardly, and lacking importance
3. Emergent — The UX work is functional and promising but done inconsistently and inefficiently
4. Structured — The organization has semi-systematic UX-related methodology that is widespread, but with varying degrees of effectiveness and efficiency
5. Integrated — UX work is comprehensive, effective, and pervasive
6. User-driven — Dedication to UX at all levels leads to deep insights and exceptional user-centered–design outcomes

Design Ladder by Danish Design Center

• Overview: The Design Ladder was invented by the Danish Design Center back in 2001 and is a four-rung maturity ladder linking design integration with business value, from invisible to strategic
• Who should use it: Business and product leaders who want to connect design maturity to business value and culture change
• When it works best: Useful when you want a business-focused perspective on design’s role, linking it directly to strategic impact like revenue and competitive advantage

I give this maturity model a B grade because it’s particularly persuasive for executives who want to frame Design Maturity as a business driver, however, it’s lighter on tactical steps.

It provides quite a bit of depth and ideas to implement design more in your business, explaining how you can embed each stage in an organization and culture. From a business perspective, The Design Ladder is based on the idea that there is a link between revenue and design.

Here’s an overview of the Design Ladder maturity model:

1. Rung 1: Non-Design — Design is invisible. Product development or marketing initiatives are undertaken by untrained designers. Things are produced by the ideas of a small number of people. The user or customer perspective does not really play a part in decisions.
2. Rung 2: Design as Styling — Design is looked at as the a way of making something look nice at the end of the process. It’s about aesthetic. For example, a product is developed and then given to a product designer to make look nice at the end. Or graphic design is used to simply create a veneer in the positioning of products or services. Little thought is given to the design of the overall experience.
3. Rung 3: Design as Process — In this rung, design is not considered as a result but as a way of thinking. Design methods are inbuilt into the early stage of product or service development. Solutions are driven by customer-centric problems and collaboration from multiple teams is employed to develop solutions and communications. The whole process is customer-centric.
4. Rung 4: Design as Strategy — Design at this level is embedded in the leadership team. Design is embraced and allowed to play a part in shaping the overall business concept. It is employed to create a vision of the company for the future and then to forge the ways the company is going to get there.

The higher you are on the design ladder the more earnings you will obtain — incidentally this was the conclusion of a research paper based on the Danish Design Ladder published way back in 2003 by Anders Kretzschmar.

Design Value Scorecard by Design Management Institute

• Overview: The Design Maturity Matrix by the Design Management Institute (DMI) is a design value scorecard that helps organizations measure design maturity to align investments with strategy
• Who should use it: Mature organizations seeking a structured diagnostic tool to align design investments with strategic goals and outcomes
• When it works best: When you’re trying to assess not just capability but also the impact of design on business performance and cross-functional collaboration

From my perspective, I give this model an A because it’s robust and data-oriented, making it strong for mature orgs that need to justify design investment, but potentially overwhelming for startups.

It can be used as a diagnostic and communications tool to:

• Understand the process maturity of the design organization
• Create a common language for strategic discussions with cross functional peers
• Align investments in design with business strategy

Bubble Model

• Overview: The Bubble Model was created by the Competence Center Design and Management (CC D&M) and describes where design sits in an organization, from peripheral to intrinsic
• Who should use it: Orgs wanting to understand how design is positioned and perceived within their organizational structure and strategy
• When it works best: Effective when design is fragmented and you need clarity on whether it lives on the periphery or is intrinsic to your strategy.

I give this model a C because it really helps visualize structural and cultural design challenges, but doesn’t offer as concrete a progression roadmap as some other models.

The Bubble Model helps companies to determine where the design function currently lives — both physically and more importantly strategically — in an organization and how to improve the integration of design. CC D&M realized that where design lives in an organization fundamentally determines how well integrated design is into their overall strategy, culture, and operations.

Here’s an overview of the Bubble model:

1. Design on the Periphery — The most common location for design in organizations is on the periphery. Design thinking and design methods have no continuous presence in the organization. Design is considered an add-on, limited to traditional design problems such as form, function and communication.
2. Design is Somewhere in the Organization — Design thinking and design methods are practiced somewhere in the organization and apply to specific products and services intended for external clients, customers, or market. This may be B2B or B2C.
3. Design is at the Center of the Organization — Design thinking and design methods are highly visible and occupy a central position. Design unifies products and services across the organization.
4. Design is Intrinsic to the Organization — Design thinking and design methods are applied at the top level of an organization as a means of inquiring into a wide range of organizational problems. The aim of this is to develop integrated solutions that reflect a high degree of coherence between the organization’s internal processes, values, products and services

Benefits of Design Maturity

Organizations suffer when design is only allowed to operate at surface levels. Looking closely, every aspect of an organization suffers, from the people to the processes to the products to the revenue.

I’ll start by diving deeper into the value of design first because that’s what leaders really care about, and then I’ll provide a vision of what successful adoption of design looks like…

The Value of Design

I recently wrote about the value of design using the extraordinary evidence from McKinsey, Harvard, Adobe, Forbes, and the NEA, where they proved design’s transformative power in business as a value driver.

One of the key insights from Harvard was that design-led companies outperform the S&P 500 Index by 228% over 10 years, which emphasizes design as a key differentiator. Which means that there’s a direct correlation between how well design is integrated and widely utilized across the organization.

Here are the extraordinary business insights they discovered:

• McKinsey Design Index (MDI): Top-quartile design-led companies excel in analytical leadership, cross-functional talent, continuous iteration, and user experience, correlating with 32% higher revenue growth and 56% higher total returns to shareholders (TRS) over five years across industries like medical technology, consumer goods, and retail banking.
• Harvard Business Review — Design Value Index: Design-driven companies outperform the S&P Index by 228% over 10 years, emphasizing design as a key differentiator in a tech-lowered barrier market where superior products or service alone are insufficient.
• Adobe — Creative Dividend: Creative companies achieve 58% YoY revenue growth of 10% or more (vs. 20% for less creative peers), 150% higher market share, and 3:1 “best places to work” recognition, driven by integrated digital experiences and customer collaboration.
• Forbes — UX Design Impact: Well-designed user interfaces raise conversion rates by up to 200%, with better UX yielding up to 400%; every $1 invested in UX returns $100 (9,900% ROI), prioritizing UX for customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention.
• National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Report: Small manufacturers investing in design see 17.5% sales increases; design-integrated firms have 24% higher product innovation probability, 9.1% higher employment growth, 18.7% higher value-added growth, and 10.4% higher productivity growth, enhancing competitiveness in global markets.

These insights prove design is a cornerstone of innovation and profitability. It also highlights the fact that in today’s tech-driven market, superior products alone don’t suffice; you must be design-driven in order to outperform your peers.

What Successful Design Adoption & Integration Looks Like

When design thinking is truly embedded — not just on the periphery or a one-day workshop — it becomes the operating system for how the company thinks, strategizes, decides, and grows. Here’s an expanded view of what that looks like in practice, across all teams (not just creative), products, and strategy:

• Leadership Alignment & Advocacy
  Mature design thinking is visibly championed from the top. The C-suite (CEO, CFO, etc.) speaks the language of design thinking, references user insights in key decisions, and protects design time/budget during crises. Without executive buy-in, even the best rituals and processes get deprioritized.
• Strategic Thinking
  Deep customer and market research is translated into actionable insights that shape the company’s strategic direction. Design thinking isn’t siloed in UX, where it’s used broadly to inform the product roadmap, business model, and even corporate strategy. Leaders ask “What do people need and want?” before “How do we make money?” and the organization follows the signal.
• Ideation & Divergent Thinking
  Teams openly generate dozens (or hundreds) of possibilities early in every project. There’s no premature killing of ideas. Brainstorming sessions feel safe and energizing, not performative. Wild concepts are encouraged, documented, and treated as fuel rather than threats. Leaders model this by asking “What else?” instead of “Which one?” first.
• Convergence
  The organization has disciplined rituals for narrowing options — voting, scoring frameworks (e.g., RICE, MoSCoW), user testing, or data signals. Convergence isn’t about compromise; it’s about identifying the strongest signal from the noise. Teams feel good about killing ideas because they know it’s in service of the best path forward.
• Visualization
  Abstract ideas are quickly made visible through sketches, journey maps, storyboards, low-fi prototypes, and physical models. People don’t debate in slides, they point at shared artifacts. Futures are tested with paper prototypes before code is written. Everyone speaks the same visual language.
• Iteration
  The organization expects ideas to evolve through critique and testing. “Version 1 is wrong” is the starting assumption, not a failure. Rapid feedback loops (weekly reviews, user tests, dogfooding) are normalized. Teams celebrate learning as much as shipping. Perfectionism is replaced with relentless improvement.
• Systems Thinking
  Design thinking connects silos. Teams look at experiences holistically using end-to-end journeys, cross-product consistency, emotional impact, and downstream effects. Decisions consider the full ecosystem: users, business, brand, tech, operations. The organization avoids tunnel vision by zooming out regularly.

How Design Leaders Should Utilize Design Maturity to Improve Their Design Practices

Design maturity is about evolving how design thinking is embedded across your company, from ad-hoc practices to a strategic driver. I put together this guide you can leverage for better design thinking, based on frameworks that I listed above. I’ll walk you through it as if I’m guiding a team I’ve led…

Step 1: Select a Design Maturity Model and Deeply Understand It

As a product leader, it doesn’t matter what Design Maturity model you use. But whatever model you choose it’s absolutely critical that you deeply understand the stages and the characteristics that define them. This is essential for leaders and businesses looking to improve their design practices and reap the benefits of a mature design organization.

Step 2: Assess Your Current Maturity Level

Start with a self-audit of your current Design Maturity level. Here’s a few ways:

• Perform an audit — If you’re an expert on Design Maturity, then you can simply perform your own audit using the model you chose in Step 1 for guidance.
• Collect data via survey — You can create your own survey to send out to your teams based on the model you chose in Step 1 to evaluate where design currently stands.
• Utilize a Design Maturity assessment tool — You can utilize a free Design Maturity assessment tool. I recommend the assessment survey from UX-PM, where you can send the link out to everyone in your organization and they can send you their final score along with a screenshot of the final analysis.

The UX-PM assessment tool will help you get some quick data across the organization in the areas of customer research, design, people, culture, metrics, and strategy.

For example, our score on the Battle.net platform (part of Blizzard/Microsoft) is a 1.6 out of a 5. We were at 2.5 (trending towards 3.0) in 2022 but unfortunately we’ve been going backwards the last few years due to leadership that doesn’t value design. However, you shouldn’t let leadership or your initial results discourage you from pushing design forward!

You can review the findings with cross-functional stakeholders to score your maturity honestly. This baseline will reveals gaps, and thus opportunities where you can make improvements.

Step 3: Create a Vision and Plan

Utilize the model you selected in Step 1 along with your assessment in Step 2 to help create a vision for what success looks like and a design maturity roadmap to help you get there. Make sure your plan clearly addresses both:

• Advancing Design Thinking knowledge and skills across the organization through targeted training and education
• Integrating Design Thinking into the core ways your organization operates, decides, and builds products

For example:

• Short term — Train teams on design thinking, workshops, user research, and empathy mapping
• Mid-term — Integrate human-centered design into product cycles
• Long-term — C-suite champions design thinking broadly in the organization

I recommend you define goals, budget (trust me you need a budget!), and align on objectives tied to business outcomes (e.g. Boost CSAT by 15% through better user journeys, etc.).

Once your Design Maturity strategy is done, make sure you review it with leadership. I’ve always found that this is one of the most important aspects of building and scaling design. I recommend including examples (e.g. Airbnb’s maturity shift doubled revenue) to help educate them on design’s value, ROI, etc.

Step 4: Build Foundational Capabilities

Start by training everyone — not just designers — on design thinking basics, starting with the Design Thinking process and workshops.

With this knowledge, start using Design Thinking workshops to help teams collaborate, ideate, and solve complex problems. Focus on divergence/convergence by encouraging wild ideation sessions, then data-driven narrowing.

Next, train everyone on Human-Centered Design for creating products and marketing that customers will love. Establish design processes, hire or train Design Thinking SME’s, and institute rituals like weekly reviews or quarterly innovation labs. Invest in tools (Figma, etc.) and hire if needed (e.g., a Design Ops lead).

Step 5: Integrate Design Thinking Organization-Wide

You can truly unlock design’s value by nurturing it in every department. You can do this by training other departments on Design Thinking, while actually embedding a designer to help them learn and grow.

Tie design to strategy by using customer insights for roadmaps. Foster a culture of experimentation and learning, where you celebrate failures as learnings. Track adoption across the org by measuring how often non-design teams use design thinking workshops, tools, etc.

Maturity rarely develops evenly across an organization. But you can accelerate the maturity of design by involving and empowering designers where ambiguity, opportunity and risk are highest. These are the areas where linear planning breaks down, expertise alone stops being enough, and teams need experimentation, creativity and distributed judgement.

I also want to note that incorporating design broadly doesn’t weaken other disciplines, it strengthens them. They help PM and engineering build design literacy without forcing those teams to compensate for an underpowered design function.

Step 6: Measure, Iterate, and Scale

Establish goals, OKRs, and KPIs (e.g., idea-to-launch time, user satisfaction, innovation rate) and embed them in your yearly organizational planning and goals. Review them quarterly to see what’s working and what’s not, and adjust goals based on data and feedback from the teams.

As maturity advances in the organization, begin to scale it from project-level to enterprise-wide. Celebrate wins to build momentum by sharing how a design thinking pivot saved costs. Remember, this isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. You should start small, build wins, and watch design thinking transform your org from reactive to visionary.

Conclusion

For a long time, most companies treated design like the “polishing department,” essentially the people you call at the end to make things look pretty. But I’ve realized that true Design Maturity isn’t about avoiding mistakes or making nicer buttons.

It’s a secret weapon and competitive advantage.

It’s what allows us to spot opportunities well before the competition even knows it exists. It gives us the guts to chase big ideas because we’ve actually done the work to understand if they’ll matter.

And if we really want our companies to do more than just survive the AI revolution, we have to stop playing defense! We need our teams to have the maturity to not just deliver a product, but to discover what’s actually worth building.

I’ve lived it long enough to know that when it’s working right, design is the thread that pulls everything together.

It helps us to understand our customers deeply, turning these insights and data into stories people actually care about. To solve complex problems anywhere in the organization. But that only happens when the power of design is understood and included from day one, sitting alongside PMs, engineering, leaders, and stakeholders shaping the path forward instead of just reacting to it.

The future we want to live in isn’t just going to show up at our door. It’s going to be built, brick by brick, by the organizations that have the courage to embrace design in everything they do.

The ultimate design maturity guide for tech leaders was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2026, I’m predicting that designing for intent, Machine Experience (MX) design, designing better prompts, and AI generated Design Systems will become the foundation of AI hyper-personalized user experiences.

I also predict that Multimodal Experiences will revolutionize the way we engage technology, and we’ll continue to elevate our designs with the return of glassmorphism, emotionally aware modes, and a pop of nostalgia. And unfortunately I predict that AI will force our Design orgs to take a giant step backwards in our Design Maturity this year, but I’ll help you avoid it.

Happy new year, grab your popcorn and enjoy my design trend recommendations for 2026!

Design Trend #1: Multimodal Experiences

I find it strange that even though we live in a world of endless screens and connected devices, our experiences still assume a single user, on a single screen, at a single moment.

That’s why I predict that will all change in 2026 as we leap into the new adventure of multimodal experience design.

One of my core design beliefs has always been that technology should adapt to humans, not the other way around.

And today that matters more than ever, because we’re no longer just sitting and clicking on a computer. We’re talking to our devices, swiping and gesturing, watching, sometimes even using our eyes or our movement to interact.

We’re also not staying in one place anymore. Everyone is constantly moving, switching between phones, laptops, cars, watches, TVs, and whatever comes next. This means experiences can’t be a single mode.

They have to flex with context, device, and personal preference. We have to design for multiple human inputs and outputs, not just touch and sight.

It’s about creating experiences that flow naturally across modes, the way humans already do.

Multimodal experiences brings all of this together:

• Voice (speech, tone, intent)
• Vision (gesture, gaze, camera)
• Touch & haptics (vibration, force)
• Context & sensors (location, movement, environment)
• Screens (still relevant, but they’re no longer the focal point)

Evolution of Design and Technology

When I look at where product design is headed, it feels like we’re moving from designing interfaces to designing full experiences. We’re shifting from:

• Visual-first to experience-first
• Screens to systems
• Control of technology to collaboration between humans and machines

Design isn’t just about where someone clicks anymore. It’s about how an experience flows through their day and adapts to their context, whether they’re on a phone, in a car, talking to a device, or switching between all three.

I see that shift also dramatically changing the role of designers too.

In multimodal systems, I’m no longer just thinking about layouts, flows, and screens. I’m designing conversations, transitions between modes, what happens when voice fails and touch takes over, and how to build trust even when there’s no visual UI at all.

It’s why modern UX (and even CX) is starting to blend with conversation design, interaction and motion, behavioral psychology, and even prompt and intent design.

Example: Google Maps Multimodal Experience

You may not have even noticed the change over the past few years, but Google Maps has been one of the first products to quietly evolve into a multimodal product.

• Visual routes when you’re planning
• Voice guidance when driving
• Haptic taps on smartwatches for turns
• Predictive suggestions before you ask

Same product. Different modes. One seamless experience.

Lesson: Multimodal experience isn’t about adding features, it’s about switching seamlessly.

Key Principles for Designing Multimodal Experiences

1. Don’t Make All Modes Equal

Not every task needs every mode. The system must recognize when to switch or combine input modes based on environment or task.

Bad multimodal experience: “You can tap, talk, gesture, swipe… all at once.”

Good multimodal experience: “We chose the best mode for this moment.”

2. Design for Seamless Mode Switching

Creating experiences with seamless mode switching means that your users shouldn’t notice when modes change. They should easily predict how their inputs affect the system, regardless of mode.

Example:

• Start with voice → glance at screen → finish with a tap
  No resets. No friction.

3. Always Design a Fallback

Voice fails in noisy places.
Gestures fail in low light.
Screens fail when hands are busy.

Multimodal Experiences are delightful when another mode steps into save the experience. Systems should gracefully handle misheard commands or ambiguous gestures.

4. Feedback Is Critical

Provide clear, mode-appropriate cues to help users understand what’s happening. Because without screens, feedback must be:

• Audible
• Haptic
• Temporal (timing-based)

A vibration, a tone, or a micro-pause can replace an entire UI screen.

5. Personalization

Allow users to customize preferred input modes or combinations.

Design Trend #2: Designing for Intent

Designers in 2026 will no longer create fixed interfaces.

I believe we’ll see a major transformation in the world of product development, where we start to design products for intent.

No more funnels. No more customer journeys. Now we’ll need to design for each user’s specific intent! Sounds crazy, right?

What is Designing for Intent?

This means creating experiences that recognize, respect, and respond to what a user is actually trying to accomplish. And not what your product wants them to do, not what features exist, and not what the system assumes.

It’s an extraordinary shift from designing interfaces to designing outcomes.

Generative systems do not follow pre-built screens. They follow patterns, predictions, and signals. This means that instead of designing for every step of a funnel, we are designing the conditions a system uses to decide what to show, what to emphasize, and how to adapt.

To design for context, we need to:

• Understand user habits and timing
• Map intentions, not just actions
• Consider edge cases where the AI might get it wrong
• Define how the system fails gracefully without frustrating users

How Do We Understand Each User’s Intent?

In generative experiences, there’s 4 primary types of user intent:

• Informational — When users seek knowledge or information on specific topics
• Navigational — When users search for a specific website, brand, or online destination
• Commercial — When users are in the consideration phase of their buyer’s journey
• Transactional — When users intend to make a purchase or engage in a specific transaction

A user’s intent can surface explicitly through a question, a prompt, or a choice, or implicitly through behavior. Google’s PAIR guidebook talks about this distinction between explicit intent and intent inferred from behavior, which forms the basis for how AI predicts what comes next.

Once the system understands the user’s intent, it predicts what the user needs next. That prediction determines what gets generated, whether that is a layout, a set of recommendations, content variations, or the next step in a flow.

The most exciting thing to me is that every user will potentially see something different based on their intent!

How Designers Can Optimize Generative Experiences

With AI, there’s no guarantee the system gets it right every time, so we need a way to tell when it actually worked.

That’s why I always make the system’s reasoning visible — similar to Grok’s reasoning example below — and tie everything back to clear goals and signals by defining what “good” looks like in the real world.

Designers should no longer judge success by how a screen looks compared to the old one, but by how users behave. If they move forward, stay engaged, and accomplish what they came for, the system made the right call. If they hesitate, ignore it, or bail, it didn’t.

It’s less about pixels now and more about whether the experience genuinely helped someone get where they wanted to go.

OpenAI describes a similar idea in their work on learning from human feedback, where systems compare predicted outcomes to desired ones.

This gives designers two places to focus optimization efforts. We can refine the experience that was generated, or we can refine how the system infers intent.

Sometimes this means improving interface patterns. Sometimes it means strengthening the signals we collect. Sometimes it means giving users clearer ways to express what they want.

Either way, the work becomes the same. We check the signals produced by a generative interface against the expected signals tied to our goals and success metrics, and we use that comparison to guide how the system adapts.

This is how designers contribute to AI-driven experiences. We are not only designing what users see. We are designing the understanding the system relies on to generate it. This requires designers to shift our focus from:

• Features to flows of understanding
• Layout to logic
• Aesthetics to intent

Design Trend #3: Machine Experience (MX) Design for Generative AI

The previous trend of designing for intent sets up this next trend, which requires us to dive below the surface of design and focus on the Machine Experience (MX) design.

Generative systems cannot rely on signals alone. They also need to understand our components, patterns, and design systems in deeper, more semantic ways.

Figma has written about this shift in their guidance on semantic design systems, emphasizing that AI needs component meaning, not just component visuals, to generate interfaces responsibly. To help with this effort, I recommend using a semantic design system that involves embedding intent and logic into every component:

• Component Documentation: Use descriptions and metadata within design tools (like Figma) to explain why a component exists and when it should be used, rather than just how it looks.
• Semantic Tokens: Use design tokens that describe a role (e.g. button-primary-background) rather than a literal value (e.g., blue-500), allowing the machine to understand the intent of the color.
• Relationship Mapping: Clearly define the relationships between components. For example, explicitly link a form label to its input field so an AI agent can correctly interpret the data requested.

This subtle shift towards MX means you’re no longer designing your site just for people. You’re designing it for the machines that now read, interpret, and summarize your content long before actual users interact with the page.

This shift is happening because user behavior isn’t what it used to be.

Your potential customers are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to “find the best,” “compare options,” or “explain the difference.” And these agents build answers by interpreting your website at a structural level.

Meaning, hierarchy, relationships, labeling, and semantic HTML cues suddenly matter as much as layout and visual design. Mike Simpson developed research where he breaks down how AI systems actually navigate a website.

He found that these systems rely on semantic HTML, clear heading hierarchy, predictable patterns, and consistent labeling to infer relevance and meaning. When those signals are messy, LLMs misread your content or leave it out entirely.

So MX isn’t some niche technical layer, it’s the new cost of visibility. The key benefits include improved discoverability in AI search results and accurate representation of your content.

It forces you to think beyond how your product looks and ask a new question: Can machines understand it well enough to represent it accurately?

If not, you’re invisible in the new AI-mediated web.

Design Trend #4: Sparking Joy with Nostalgia

I keep noticing how much nostalgia is popping up, well pretty much everywhere! It tugs at my heartstrings when it’s used well, so I’m hoping 2026 is when it fully becomes intentional instead of trendy.

Nostalgia works well when it’s not just using retro for the sake of aesthetics. It’s designers deliberately pulling from familiar patterns, sounds, and interactions to make products feel emotionally safe in an increasingly chaotic world.

When everything is changing fast because of AI, economic pressure, and endless new tools, familiarity becomes a feature.

Just look at the success of the Stranger Things series.

People didn’t just love the story. They loved the brands, packaging, and design language of the ’80s that showed up everywhere, from Eggo waffles to arcade machines and mall storefronts.

I found that these visuals set off deep emotions of comfort, curiosity, and emotional attachment for me, and even for lots of other people who never lived in that era. That same emotional response is exactly what designers are chasing.

There’s plenty of other great examples I’ve seen, especially in fast food. Burger King, Pepsi, Pizza Hut, and countless others brought back their old logos. And I love everything about it.

Beyond branding, nostalgia will be utilized in product design through UI patterns that feel familiar, typography that echoes early software or the early web, playful skeuomorphic cues making a quiet comeback, and micro-interactions that feel tactile instead of abstract.

It’s less about copying the past and more about borrowing its emotional clarity. Back then, interfaces were simpler, intentions were clearer, and users didn’t feel like every click was being optimized to death.

Designing for nostalgia is really about establishing a deep emotional connection with your users.

When something feels familiar, people relax. They explore more. They forgive more. In 2026, nostalgia becomes a deliberate design tool — not just a gimmick — helping modern products feel human, warm, and reassuring in a world that desperately needs it.

Design Trend #5: Return of Glassmorphism

Speaking of nostalgia, Glassmorphism is back baby!

It feels like it’s returned from college, this time a little more mature.

I remember when it was once dismissed as a flashy visual trend, but now glass has re-entered the design conversation with a clearer purpose, borrowing lessons from skeuomorphism’s obsession with realism and neumorphism’s subtle depth experiments.

I think the 2026 version feels less like an aesthetic trend and more like a functional design layer you can finally use without fighting your tools. It’s actually easier to implement things like frosted panels, translucent surfaces, diffused shadows, and layered depth.

Apple is Leading the Way

Apple is leading the charge with glassmorphism. With Liquid Glass, they’ve turned glassmorphism into a dynamic and visually appealing system rather than a static style.

All thanks to emerging technologies like modern blur APIs, standardized system styles, and better cross-device performance.

I think the new version of glassmorphism is mostly about controlling opacity, background blur radius, and elevation. You’re deciding how much of the environment bleeds through and how quickly it diffuses.

For Apple, their genius lies in their recognition that the future of computing is spatial. With Vision Pro already in the market and Apple Glass rumored to be in development, the Liquid Glass UI serves as a bridge between our current flat interfaces and the immersive, layered experiences of augmented reality.

I believe it’s very strategic that they’re training users to interact with floating, translucent elements now, because Apple is preparing us for a world where digital objects exist in three-dimensional space.

Accessibility Issues with Glassmorphism

However, I agree with the critics there’s definitely some serious accessibility concerns with resurrecting this style. The most common issues are inconsistent readability, where text becomes too light, too dark, or completely washed out. And if your background image is busy it will only make it worse.

I’m cringing just looking at those ugly screenshots below, yikes!

Thankfully it’s completely customizable, so you can quickly fix these issues. But I’d recommend Apple to quickly build in a feature that analyzes accessibility based on a user’s settings and provides recommendations to improve it.

So if you’re leaning into glassmorphism this year, here’s a few recommendations:

• Maintain high contrast for text and essential features to ensure it maintains a WCAG-safe contrast ratio
• Implement an opacity slider or transparency options in your product so it’s easy to reduce or disable glass effects based on user preferences.
• Test against real backgrounds, in motion, across light and dark modes

Design Trend #6: AI Generated Design Systems

I’m predicting in 2026 that we’ll see Design Systems created with AI.

I have a love/hate relationship with Design Systems. Mainly because I feel like they steal valuable time away from designers in the actual design of thoughtful experiences that solve customers’ problems.

However, once they’re built they certainly provide an efficiency boost for designers by saving time, reducing repetitive tasks, and helping teams deliver consistent, high-quality user experiences. A well-structured system allows designers and developers to work faster, avoid starting from scratch, and focus on meaningful problems.

So AI generated Design Systems feel inevitable, and perhaps a little unsettling.

On the surface I like the idea where you feed AI your brand, a few constraints, and boom — a full design system with components, tokens, and patterns magically appears. Speed like that is hard to ignore, especially in a world where teams are constantly being asked to do more with less.

But here’s the thing. Design Systems aren’t just libraries of components. They’re a record of decisions. They encode taste, tradeoffs, and hard-won context about users, technology, and the business. When AI generates a system instantly, it skips the conversations that usually make a system actually useful.

You get consistency without conviction.

I’ve already seen teams treat AI-generated systems as shortcuts, dropping them into products without asking why certain patterns exist or when they should be broken. The result looks polished, but it’s brittle. The system works right up until the moment something unusual happens, which is most real products.

That said, I don’t think AI-created design systems are bad. I think they’re powerful starting points. Used well, they can accelerate groundwork and free teams to focus on higher-level problems. Used poorly, they replace thinking with output.

The real question isn’t whether AI can create design systems — it’s whether teams are mature enough to take ownership of what the AI produces.

Experimenting with Motiff AI Tool

Among all the tools available, Motiff stands out. While many hoped Figma would lead the AI revolution in design systems, Motiff took the first step. It focuses on three major areas: system creation, system maintenance, and consistency checks.

When I used Motiff, I uploaded raw design files like basic UI screens. Motiff scanned the files and extracted every reusable element: colors, icons, badges, popups, tabs, and more. It gave me a full visual inventory of the design without any components having been built.

It even told me how many times a certain element was used and showed me where it appeared. For someone who often audits large files created by multiple designers, this was a game changer. It did not create the components for me, but it gave me clarity, speed, and control. I could decide what to include and how to build.

Motiff also offers a consistency checker. Once a design system is in place, it helps ensure that every screen uses the right components and styles. It highlights mismatches and suggests how to fix them. If needed, it can replace outdated styles across the file instantly.

Looking ahead, I believe there is so much more AI can do in this space:

• Smart suggestions for components based on usage patterns
• Pattern detection across live product files
• Usage analytics for patterns and components
• Syncing design tokens across platforms
• Governance bots that flag inconsistencies and outdated documents
• Summarizing team conversations into action items for design system tasks
• Accessibility validation based on country-specific compliance laws

These ideas are not far off. Many are already being explored in labs and prototypes.

Design Trend #7: Emotionally Aware Modes

I love this next prediction for 2026 where we design for our users’ emotions!

This one is personal for me, because I’ve believed for a long time that the future of great products isn’t just making them smarter.

It’s about making them emotional.

Quick Intro to Emotional Design

A few years ago I wrote about why emotional design is what separates products people use from products people actually love. I talked about how the most successful experiences don’t just solve functional problems, they connect with us on a human level. How they make us feel understood, calm, confident, energized, or inspired.

This builds off of Don Norman’s book on Emotional Design, where he broke down how we experience products on three levels:

• Visceral: how it looks and feels at first glance
• Behavioral: how well it works and supports us
• Reflective: what it means to us and how it makes us feel about ourselves

What’s fascinating is that these three emotional layers map almost perfectly to where interfaces are heading. I believe products will start triggering all three intentionally this year. Not just through visual polish, but through systems that adapt to how we feel, what we’re doing, and the rhythm of our day.

We already live in constantly shifting contexts: deep work, casual scrolling, late-night exhaustion, early-morning ambition. So I keep asking myself:

• Why should an interface feel the same in the morning as it does at night?
• Why should it behave the same when I’m stressed versus energized?
• Why should it look the same when I’m trying to focus versus unwind?
• Why should it look the same for every season of the year?

Emotionally aware modes are the natural evolution of human-centered design. They’re about building interfaces that respond to internal context, not just external ones.

What Exactly Is Designing for Emotions?

Designing for emotions is where experiences don’t just adapt to screen size or environment, but to you and your mood, your energy level, what you’re doing, and even the time of day.

And honestly, I think it makes total sense.

Our lives are a constant blend of work, focus, stress, downtime, creativity, and rest.

Think of it as the UI version of Spotify’s mood playlists. The experience subtly changes its vibe to match your state visually, behaviorally, and even psychologically.

• Morning Mode (Visceral): light palettes, energetic motion, optimistic typography
• Focus Mode (Behavioral): low contrast, minimal animation, calm rhythm
• Evening Mode (Visceral + Behavioral): warmer tones, slower transitions, reduced cognitive load
• Reflective Modes: themes that reinforce identity like creative, calm, playful, professional

It’s personalization at an emotional level as the interface mirrors how you feel or how you want to feel.

Why This Matters

Norman argued that emotion directly affects cognition, problem solving, and trust. When people feel calm, confident, or delighted, they literally think better. That means emotionally aware interfaces don’t just look nicer, they actually work better by:

• Reducing cognitive fatigue
• Increasing long-term engagement
• Building trust and attachment
• Making products feel like companions, not tools

How Designers Can Bring This to Life

Designing for emotion in 2026 means:

• Starting with emotional intent, not visual style
• Designing systems of feeling, not just screens
• Treating color, motion, copy, sound, and pacing as emotional instruments
• Giving users control, not just automation
• Being transparent and ethical about emotional sensing

I truly believe we’re moving from reactive interfaces to empathetic ones. From products that respond to clicks… to products that quietly understand how we’re feeling. And when we finally design across the visceral, behavioral, and reflective layers together, experiences won’t just be usable or beautiful.

They’ll finally feel human.

Design Trend #8: Designing Better Prompts

I’ll admit it, AI keeps me up at night.

Not because AI is going to replace me, but because of all the hot garbage AI is producing while destroying good design in the process.

It’s like OpenAI and all the other LLMs completely ignored design when creating ChatGPT. Clearly these interfaces were created by engineers and designed to produce high volumes of poop.

Especially when it comes to anything visual like graphics, wireframes, UI’s, etc. These LLMs aren’t smart enough to understand the visual language.

What these LLMs are very good at doing is shortcutting good thinking. Which in turn produces lots of generic outputs. And somehow everyone has jumped aboard the mediocrity train in the process. So where’s the humanity? And where the hell is design?

Because this is where us designers shine.

We’re experts at turning complex needs into coherent, usable systems. And the thing that AI needs most is what design brings to the table: empathy, clarity, and the ability to shape the human experience into cohesive beautiful products that customers love.

Until these LLMs improve the experience to help users create better outputs, then in the short term it’s up to us designers to help optimize prompts with good design.

Here’s my thoughts on the prompt design checklist you need to help optimize your outputs:

1. Who is it for? (Empathy)

• Who’s the audience, and what do they already know?
• What emotional state are they likely in? (Curious, anxious, rushed?)
• How should the AI “sound” to match that?

2. What’s the intent? (Strategic Judgment)

• What problem are we solving, and is text the best way?
• What’s the specific outcome we want from this output?
• Do we need one answer or multiple options to compare?

3. What are the boundaries? (Guardianship of Consequence)

• Are there facts that must be correct and sources that must be cited?
• Any legal, ethical, or accessibility constraints to bake in?
• What should the AI explicitly avoid doing?

4. How will you verify?

• What steps will you take to check the output against real user needs?
• Who else should review it before it goes live?

Design Trend #9: Design Maturity Takes a Step Backwards

This last one is a bit painful for me, but if you were awake for trend #8 then it’s no surprise that I’m predicting we’ll see design maturity weaken in 2026 in most large organizations. Ouch.

Not because designers are somehow less talented or ambitious, but because AI introduces a level of speed and ambiguity that most organizations are structurally unprepared to absorb.

Design Orgs are rushing to “use AI” without first redefining the design process, quality bars, or decision ownership. As a result, I’ve seen output dramatically increase while being thoughtful becomes less important, reducing outcomes along the way.

It’s as if everyone is sprinting as fast as they can in the wrong direction! The result is a quiet erosion of design maturity, pushing designers back into the role of fast-producing mockup monkeys instead of strategic problem solvers.

What is Design Maturity?

For context, Design Maturity is really two interconnected pillars:

• The level of Design Thinking knowledge and skill across every employee — not just designers, but PMs, engineers, marketers, and executives.
• How well Design Thinking is integrated into the core ways the organization operates, makes decisions, and builds products.

You can have brilliant designers who live and breathe empathy, iteration, and prototyping, but if design is still siloed and treated like a final coat of paint, maturity stays low. The opposite is just as true: you can have design perfectly embedded in every process, but if the team lacks real depth in Design Thinking, you’re just going through the motions.

There’s a few different Design Maturity models — I prefer to use InVision’s 5 Levels model because it’s simple and backed by research.

They surveyed over 2,200 companies worldwide and published their findings in The New Design Frontier, a comprehensive report examining design’s impact on business outcomes.

Design maturity encompasses the processes, tools, and methodologies used to create products, services, and experiences that meet customer needs and drive business success. Achieving a high level of design maturity is crucial for companies seeking to differentiate themselves in a competitive market and deliver exceptional user experiences.

The concept of design maturity is built around the idea that organizations progress through various stages as they develop their design capabilities.

As a design leader, I’ve always built design maturity into my yearly strategies and goals for my Design orgs and teams. However, I’ve been shocked to see that most design leaders haven’t even heard of “design maturity” let alone how to mature their Design orgs.

Understanding these stages and the characteristics that define them is essential for businesses looking to improve their design practices and reap the benefits of a mature design organization.

Why Design Maturity Is Going Backwards

The challenge with introducing a revolutionary new technology like AI, is that it collapses the time between idea and artifact, which feels like progress.

But when everything can be generated instantly, teams skip over the foundational parts of the design process — framing, research, and exploration — which are the very practices that define mature design organizations.

Junior designers rely on prompts instead of judgment. Senior designers are pulled into production firefighting instead of strategy.

It’s concerning when I see craft becoming optional, not intentional.

At the same time, leadership continues to pressure teams to “do more with less” accelerates the damage. Headcount shrinks, expectations rise, and AI is positioned as a substitute for experience rather than a multiplier of it. Design systems are bypassed, standards are relaxed, and consistency gives way to velocity.

What once took careful collaboration is now treated as a throughput problem.

The paradox is clear: AI should enable higher maturity, but without strong leadership, shared standards, and clear intent, it does the opposite. In 2026, the most mature design teams won’t be the ones using the most AI.

They’ll be the ones disciplined enough to slow down, think deeply, and use AI deliberately instead of desperately.

Conclusion

When I wrote about these design trends, I kept coming back to one idea:

Design is becoming human again.

We’re moving past screens that only look good toward systems that actually adapt, understand, and care about what people are trying to accomplish. Voice, gesture, AI prediction, and spatial context all adds up to experiences that feel personal, powerful, and sometimes emotional.

And yeah, that means designers need new muscles: empathy, systems thinking, intent modeling, and even psychology. But if you embrace that, you’re not just shaping interfaces — you’re shaping how people interact with technology at its deepest levels.

To me, that’s what makes 2026 feel exciting instead of intimidating.

What’s Next for Design?

I’d love to get your feedback on this post as well as any new trends in UX/UI design you’re predicting we’ll see this year. And don’t forget to go back and revisit my design trends of the past: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019

The most popular experience design trends of 2026 was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve written extensively about Minimum Viable Products (MVP), which is a powerful approach to building a new product with enough features to attract early-adopters and validate a product idea at the beginning of the product development cycle.

The problem is that users are no longer easily impressed by simple tech. Or ugly tech.

This has led to the rise of the Minimum Lovable Product (MLP).

A Brief History of MVP’s

MVP’s helped organizations create “test” versions of their products in order to quickly get it into the hands of their target users to gather feedback and understand whether the core idea of their product worked. In Agile product development, this lessens risk and allows teams to iterate more quickly, rather than building a fully idealized product only to have it fail.

MVP’s worked for the last 20 years, but the rise of advanced technologies & tools, the maturity of product design, and the new generation of digital natives have redefined the expectations for the tech market. Consumers have access to a ton of — and are creating their own — high-quality games, content, and experiences from all of their devices.

So if you’re going to sell something, it has to be on par with what they’re creating on their own. This is how MLP’s help startups to focus on delivering product experiences customers love rather than getting to market as fast as possible with a subpar MVP.

What is an MLP?

A Minimal Lovable Product is the first version of a product that’s designed to not only solve a problem, but also to delight users and foster a positive emotional connection.

This means going beyond the basic functionality of an MVP.

It’s more than just making a product functional, it also has to be reliable, usable, and pleasurable from the initial launch. This usually requires more time, money, and resources.

Mainly because an MLP requires deep discovery to understand what your customers care about, as well as their problems and needs. And from these insights you’ll know how your digital product can make their lives better by solving key problems.

You’ll also need to consider the customer experience (CX) as a whole and strive for love at every stage. As a result, customers will not only purchase your product or service — but they will also want to see your company thrive.

However, I should caution you that building an MLP is not easy.

It will force you to weigh your options when building your product and/or UX strategy, because MLP’s typically take longer to build, are more expensive, and generally are built to disrupt saturated markets where you’re trying to distinguish your brand and user experience above others. It also requires more expertise across product development — from early stages through deployment — which includes marketing/branding, CX, user research, and customer service.

Benefits of MLPs

There’s a lot of benefits of building an MLP, including:

• Stronger User Engagement — Instead of just meeting basic functionality, an MLP excites and resonates with users, increasing adoption and retention
• Faster Validation & Feedback — By launching a lovable experience early, teams can quickly gather insights, iterate, and refine based on real user reactions
• Competitive Differentiation — A well-designed MLP helps a product stand out by delivering an experience that users emotionally connect with, not just tolerate
• Efficient Resource Allocation — Prioritizing delight alongside core functionality ensures development efforts focus on features that drive long-term success.
• Increased Virality & Advocacy — A product that users love is more likely to generate word-of-mouth marketing, fostering organic growth and community engagement.

How to Evolve Your MVP into an MLP

I believe MLP’s are leading the way forward because nowadays you need to bring a little life to your product and let people love it.

Here’s how to transform your MVP into an MLP:

1. Bring design to the table early — Rather than building your product and then handing it over to your designers to “make it pretty” at the end, work with them from the start. Even if it’s best working product in the world, with terrible UX design, it’s doomed to fail.

2. Build your community — Having a loyal and enthusiastic community is a gold mine for any company. Work with your marketing team to create online spaces for your users.

3. Tell your story — Focus on telling your “why” (vs the “what”) by weaving it into the very fabric of your product.

4. Gather the right qualitative feedback — Lovability is subjective, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be data-driven, so listen to your customers when they tell you how they feel about your product. Give them what they want, as well as what they need.

5. Remember the ‘M’ in MLP — The focus here is still to launch the minimum in case you need to pivot. Focus on lovable features and design that aren’t overly expensive.

Conclusion

MLP’s are the future for those that want to foster deeper emotional connection from the initial launch with a product that’s not only functional, but also reliable, usable, and pleasurable.

Does that mean MVP’s no longer have a place in product development? Of course not. They’re a valuable first step and a great way to validate your idea. If you’re low on resources, it’s better to ship something than nothing at all.

The great thing about MLP’s is that development teams now have options to better position themselves as disruptors in saturated markets. This is where brand and user experience really matter if you’re trying to steal customers from entrenched competitors.

With so much competition and new startups entering every market daily, developing MLP’s will be a significant competitive advantage for startups in the years ahead.

From MVP to MLP: Transforming Product Development was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Design is powerful.

Design is powerful as a catalyst for change.
Design is powerful for developing innovative solutions.
Design is powerful for driving exponential growth for businesses.
Design is powerful in solving some of the world’s most difficult problems.

If design is so revolutionary, why do so few companies embrace design?

I wrote about the failure of Fortune 500 companies to embrace design beyond their art departments, where most Fortune 500 companies still fail to even adopt a single design methodology in a meaningful and useful capacity, let alone utilize design broadly in their organizations.

From my experience working and consulting with these firms, the failure to embrace design comes from naive leaders with legacy mindsets, where they reward their teams for doing things the way they’ve always done them. There’s also exogenous factors like our failing education system and societal norms — all have played a part in slowing the progress of design.

However, I’ve found the number one reason that Fortune 500 executives don’t fully buy into design as a catalyst for innovation and growth is that most executives still don’t understand the value of design or how to quantify design’s value.

That is, until now…

Insight #1: The McKinsey Design Index

Design-led companies increased their revenues and total returns to shareholders (TRS) substantially faster than their industry counterparts

McKinsey is one of the top management consulting firms that solves some of the toughest challenges for leading businesses, governments, and institutions around the world. They’re also a strategic thought leader where they publish their research & insights in the McKinsey Quarterly.

Leading a pioneering study in 2018, McKinsey set out to link design and financial performance for the first time ever. They tracked the design practices of 300 publicly listed companies over 5 years in multiple countries and industries, where they interviewed and surveyed senior business and design leaders. More than two million pieces of financial data were collected and more than 100,000 design actions were recorded.

To analyze the data, McKinsey used advanced regression analysis to uncover the 12 actions showing the greatest correlation with improved financial performance and then clustered these actions into the following four broad themes of good design:

• Analytical leadership
• Cross-functional talent
• Continuous iteration
• User experience

The four themes of good design described above form the basis of the McKinsey Design Index (MDI), which rates companies by how strong they are at design and how that links up with the financial performance of each company.

The McKinsey research yielded several striking findings, where they found the top-quartile companies in design — and leading financial performers — excelled in all four areas.

The most powerful insight they found was a strong correlation between high MDI scores and superior business performance. This proves that design is a key driver of business value, innovation, and growth!

Top-quartile MDI scorers increased their revenues and total returns to shareholders (TRS) substantially faster than their industry counterparts did over a five-year period, with 32% higher revenue growth and 56% higher TRS growth for the period as a whole.

The results were the same in all three of the industries that McKinsey looked at, including medical technology, consumer goods, and retail banking.

This led to an extraordinary insight: that good design matters equally across companies who focus on physical goods, digital products, services, or some combination of these.

TRS and revenue differences between the fourth, third, and second quartiles were marginal. In other words, the market disproportionately rewarded companies that truly stood out from the crowd (see charts below).

Insight #2: Harvard Business Review — Design Value Index

Design-driven companies have beat the S&P Index over 10 years by a wide margin

To better understand how design leads to returns, Harvard Business Review worked with the Design Management Institute to produce a new tool that tracks the results of design-centric companies against companies who haven’t embraced design. They call it the Design Value Index, where they analyze the performance of US companies committed to design as an integral part of their business strategy.

They found that better products or a superior customer service are no longer enough to stand out. Technology has lowered barriers for entry and, with that, kicked off a new era of competition.

The most powerful insight revealed from the Design Value Index is that design-driven companies have outperformed the S&P Index by 228% over 10 years!

Top companies are leading with design. Others that aren’t willing to invest in design because they think it can’t be measured or tied to ROI will fall behind.

Business as usual is no longer good enough. Mature industries that have focused on more, better, and faster now need to adjust their thinking to include design as a key value differentiator.

Insight #3: Adobe — The Creative Dividend

Companies that foster creativity enjoy substantially larger market share

In May 2014, Adobe partnered with Forrester Consulting to develop research on how creativity influences business outcomes. The study surveyed senior managers from corporations around the world and from myriad industries to quantify and qualify how creativity impacts business results. They wanted to see if companies that cultivate creativity are more profitable than those that don’t.

The results were remarkable, where they found that creative companies do in fact achieve exceptional revenue growth compared to their peers — 58% of survey respondents that said their firms foster creativity had year over year (YoY) revenue increase by 10% or more. In contrast, only 20% of less creative companies performed similarly.

Digging further, design-led companies invest heavily in powerful customer experiences (CX) and digital products — key elements to get customers’ attention and motivate them to keep coming back. Design is critical to ensure customers are discovering, engaging, and buying products seamlessly across devices, while optimizing each touch point to ensure customers are satisfied with their experience.

Their survey showed that creative companies are also more likely to have a commanding market leadership position with a 150% higher market share than their competitors.

Creative companies outperform their peers, achieving 69% recognition as “best places to work” compared to just 27% of less creative firms, a 3:1 ratio, fostering high-performance environments that drive innovation and employee satisfaction. By prioritizing creativity, 83 creative firms earn national accolades versus 26 less creative ones, proving a positive work culture enhances both reputation and performance.

To harness creativity, 58% of companies set goals for creative outcomes and collaborate with customers, while 55% of executives prioritize and 48% fund innovative ideas from brainstorming. Leadership must nurture and invest in programs that boost creative capability, including early technology adoption and novel customer experiences, to strengthen brand loyalty and business success across industries.

Insight #4: Forbes — Good UX Design Means Better Business

Better UX design dramatically increases conversion rates and has an huge impact on ROI

In today’s digital landscape, delivering seamless, frictionless user experiences across all platforms is a critical expectation, as optimized UX has become a prerequisite for success. By understanding customers’ needs and aligning interactions with their daily lives, companies can enhance engagement and drive business outcomes effectively.

Creative firms excel by offering integrated digital experiences that balance content and conversions, yet many leaders focus solely on revenue, overlooking UX’s transformative potential. Targeted UX strategies, informed by clear customer insights, empower brands to strengthen their digital ecosystem, boost loyalty, and achieve significant business impact.

In a recent study from Forrester Research, a well-designed user interface could raise your website’s conversion rate by up to a 200%, and a better UX design could yield conversion rates up to 400%.

While I know the power of design, seeing that data is eye opening. I recommend that executives immediately prioritize UX not only to be more competitive, but also to boost customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention. UX is a means to these ends, requiring a comprehensive approach that accounts for diverse user influences and embeds UX into long-term business strategy for lasting impact.

Research from Forrester shows that those companies that do invest in UX design, on average, every dollar invested in UX brings 100 in return. That’s an ROI of 9,900%!

Businesses are radically transforming with UX design — so the question is not if or when to adapt, but how to make UX a priority and not an afterthought. Early adopters of innovation gain competitive advantage, and the benefits of adopting an effective UX strategy are transformational.

Insight #5: National Endowment for the Arts — Small Manufacturers Increased Sales with Design

A National Endowment for the Arts report found small manufacturers saw a massive increase in average sales after investing in design

For centuries, industrial design has shaped the way products are created, but its transformative power as a catalyst for business growth has only recently gained the spotlight. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) highlights this in a compelling report, showing industrial design as an underutilized driver of success for U.S. small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs), which are defined as companies with fewer than 500 employees. These businesses are the backbone of American manufacturing, generating 56% of new manufacturing jobs, comprising 98% of manufacturing firms, and handling 60% of the process from raw materials to consumer products.

As global competition intensifies, driven by the rise of companies like Apple and the Internet of Things (IoT), alongside growing consumer demand for superior user experiences, industrial design has become indispensable.

It’s no longer just about aesthetics; it’s about rethinking how products are made and how they solve real-world problems, positioning design as a cornerstone of innovation and economic growth.

In the past decade, the emergence of design thinking has redefined industrial design’s role, extending its methodologies to tackle a wide range of business challenges. Design thinking — as a creative and iterative process — involves identifying company-wide and product-specific problems, analyzing solutions with manufacturing in mind, and crafting answers that prioritize the end user’s needs. This approach has proven critical in an era where successful product launches face intense pressure.

Jeneanne Rae, in her article “What is the Real Value of Design,” captures this shift where she says “Design can also make great strides to help get the cost out of manufactured goods through rethinking the ways and means products come together.” By optimizing production processes, design not only enhances product appeal but also drives significant cost savings, amplifying its financial impact.

The business case for design is unbelievable. Procter & Gamble, known for brands like Tide and Pampers, exemplifies this by developing thinner, cheaper, and more sustainable plastics, potentially saving up to $1 billion annually. This innovation illustrates how design can simultaneously manage costs and drive top-line growth, effectively doubling its financial impact.

Companies that integrate design don’t just cut expenses; they create products that resonate with consumers, fostering loyalty and market differentiation.

The NEA report emphasizes that SMMs leveraging design see tangible benefits, as their agility allows them to adapt quickly to market demands, unlike larger firms bogged down by bureaucracy. Further evidence of design’s value comes from Fernando Galindo-Rueda and Valentine Millot in their study “Measuring Design and its Role in Innovation.”

They state that “the use of design as an integrated element is highly correlated with innovation outcomes, particularly product and marketing innovations, including new-to-market innovations. Controlling for observed the probability of introducing a product innovation is 24% higher for firms where design is integrated.”

Their data reveals that firms with integrated design achieve a 9.1% higher employment growth rate, an 18.7% higher value-added growth rate, and a 10.4% higher productivity growth rate compared to similar-sized firms without design integration.

These metrics really showcase design’s role in driving not just innovation but also measurable economic gains.

In today’s tech-driven market, where consumer expectations are higher than ever, design is no longer optional — it’s essential. Companies that harness design as an integrated strategy can differentiate their products, streamline operations, and meet evolving consumer demands.

The success of SMMs, which form the majority of U.S. manufacturing, hinges on embracing design to stay competitive. From cost savings to market-leading innovation, industrial design proves its worth as a powerful engine for growth, transforming businesses and redefining what’s possible in manufacturing.

Conclusion

As a designer, I feel like I’m finally being awakened out of a long nightmare where design wasn’t understood or valued. Sure many of us designers have known the truth about design’s value for a very long time, but along the way there’s only been a few business leaders who have dared to embrace design.

Now thanks to the undeniable evidence from McKinsey, Harvard Business Review, Adobe, Forbes, and the NEA, the world will finally know about design’s transformative power in business as a value driver. And we can finally bury the myth that design is a cost center.

The extraordinary business insights mentioned earlier in this article are worth repeating:

• McKinsey Design Index (MDI): Top-quartile design-led companies excel in analytical leadership, cross-functional talent, continuous iteration, and user experience, correlating with 32% higher revenue growth and 56% higher total returns to shareholders (TRS) over five years across industries like medical technology, consumer goods, and retail banking.
• Harvard Business Review — Design Value Index: Design-driven companies outperform the S&P Index by 228% over 10 years, emphasizing design as a key differentiator in a tech-lowered barrier market where superior products or service alone are insufficient.
• Adobe — Creative Dividend: Creative companies achieve 58% YoY revenue growth of 10% or more (vs. 20% for less creative peers), 150% higher market share, and 3:1 “best places to work” recognition, driven by integrated digital experiences and customer collaboration.
• Forbes — UX Design Impact: Well-designed user interfaces raise conversion rates by up to 200%, with better UX yielding up to 400%; every $1 invested in UX returns $100 (9,900% ROI), prioritizing UX for customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention.
• National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Report: Small manufacturers investing in design see 17.5% sales increases; design-integrated firms have 24% higher product innovation probability, 9.1% higher employment growth, 18.7% higher value-added growth, and 10.4% higher productivity growth, enhancing competitiveness in global markets.

These insights prove design is a cornerstone of innovation and profitability. It also highlights the fact that in today’s tech-driven market, superior products alone don’t suffice; you must be design-driven in order to outperform your peers.

Some of the world’s best companies have already embraced design, from IDEO’s Design Thinking revolutionizing consulting to the designers who co-founded Airbnb to Jony Ive’s role as Chief Design Officer at Apple. These companies know that design is essential and valuable tool for innovation, growth, and beating their competition.

Now, it’s time for all of us to champion this data and seize the opportunity to apply design in every organization!

Share these insights at work, home, and school while advocating for design’s strategic role. Let’s passionately make the case to our business leaders, using data and insights to integrate design into company missions, strategies, and operations, where we know it will fuel innovation, develop products that customer love, and deliver extraordinary business value.

Business insights that prove the value of design was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Product Manager (PM) role has gained prominence in recent years as companies have embraced Agile methodologies to drive innovation and keep up with rising customer expectations. The accelerating pace of technological advancements has made Product Management more complex while simultaneously increasing its importance in delivering successful products.

But is Product Management truly dying? Or is it evolving in ways that many organizations struggle to support?

Before diving into the challenges facing the role, let’s examine why Product Management is so critical.

The Product Manager’s Role

The responsibilities of a Product Manager vary across organizations, but at its core, Product Management is about strategically guiding a product’s development, launch, and growth.

PMs work at the intersection of business, techology, and UX/design, continuously addressing key questions:

• Do our customers want this feature or product?
• Can we build this feature or product effectively?
• Should we build this feature or product given our business objectives?

A well-functioning Product Management team ensures that innovation aligns with business strategy and user needs, driving long-term success. However, several systemic issues are eroding the effectiveness of the role.

Six Major Challenges Undermining Product Management

Despite its strategic importance, Product Management often faces significant hurdles that prevent PMs from operating at their full potential. Here are six key problems I’ve seen that threaten the role’s effectiveness and how they can be addressed.

Problem #1: Undefined or Poorly Defined Roles

Many organizations, especially those new to Agile, lack a clear understanding of what Product Managers do. This often leads to PMs being utilized as Project Managers (PJMs) who simply manage timelines, rather than strategic leaders shaping product direction.

Without a well-defined role, PMs can lose ownership over key decisions, leading to fragmented strategies and misaligned teams.

Solution: Companies must establish clear expectations for PMs, differentiating them from Project Managers and Business Analysts. Leadership should ensure PMs have the authority to drive product decisions while fostering collaboration across teams.

Problem #2: Forcing PMs to Wear Too Many Hats

The other common issue facing PMs is that many organizations — especially large organizations who are dealing with resource constraints — often stretch the PMs thin by forcing them to handle the Scrum Master and/or Product Owner roles.

PMs might be able to handle extra roles for a few sprints while hiring for these other roles, but forcing them to wear multiple hats for the long term can have devastating consequences.

PMs who wear multiple hats quickly get burned out, and this often impacts the product teams who will suffer from not having a leader focused on solving complex problems for their customers and business.

Solution: Organizations should ensure PMs are able to 100% focus on their role of leading teams and building successful products. Minimizing other distractions to their role is imperative to maximize the value that PMs deliver.

Problem #3: Responsibility Without Authority

PMs are often given extensive responsibility for a product’s success but lack the authority to make critical decisions. This problem becomes more pronounced in matrixed organizations, where cross-functional teams report to different leaders.

For example, I’ve seen executives suddenly mandate a shift in priorities based on anecdotal feedback or gut instinct, or even diving into the weeds to “help manage” a team through a marketing beat or high profile launch.

I’ve also seen leadership add new resources to a product team “to speed things up,” where PMs may struggle to integrate them effectively, especially if they lack Agile experience or knowledge of the product and/or users.

All of these types of leadership mismanagement can disrupt workflows and actually derail progress. Even worse, when leaders micromanage their teams, it not only leads to low morale and increase churn, but also results in PMs losing their confidence and relying on leadership input for direction.

Solution: Organizations should empower PMs with greater decision-making authority within product teams. Leadership must trust PMs to guide the team and ensure alignment rather than undermining their role with ad-hoc changes and micromanagement.

Leaders should focus the bulk of their time getting out ahead of their product teams by focusing on future business and product strategies that are at least a quarter (3 months) away.

Problem #4: Executives Don’t Always Embrace Agile Principles

Even after an Agile transformation, I’ve seen many executives continue to operate with traditional management mindsets. They may still lead without a product strategy, enforce rigid project plans, dictate product prioritization without user research, or disrupt sprints with last-minute changes.

This often leads the PMs and teams to implement a form of “fake” Agile.

Executives might adopt Agile methodologies as a mere checkbox exercise without truly embracing the cultural shift that comes with it. The result is a superficial adherence to Agile practices, devoid of the collaborative and adaptive spirit that defines Agile development.

This can cause a lot of frustration among PMs and team members and a failure to reap the incredible benefits of true agility.

Solution: The most detrimental aspect of fake Agile development lies in the misalignment of values, where PMs and Agile coaches should proactively bridge this gap by:

• Providing executives with leadership focused Agile education that aligns with business objectives to help them embrace the notion that product teams are self-organizing and can make good decisions when given autonomy and trust
• Encouraging regular engagement with product teams and customer feedback
• Demonstrating how iterative development leads to better outcomes through data-driven insights

Problem #5: Overemphasis on Technical Skills at the Expense of Business and Creativity

A common misconception is that Product Managers must be highly technical. While technical expertise can be valuable in certain industries, an overemphasis on technical skills can sideline creativity, business acumen, and user research, all of which are critical for building great products.

However, this does not mean that PMs should be entirely non-technical. In some companies and industries, technical PMs are essential for success, particularly when dealing with complex engineering challenges.

Solution: Organizations should tailor PM skill requirements based on the needs of their specific products. Instead of forcing all PMs into a one-size-fits-all mold, companies should recognize that:

• Some products require deep technical expertise (e.g. AI, cloud infrastructure, etc.)
• Others benefit from strong UX, creativity, or market expertise (e.g. consumer apps, media platforms, etc.)
• A balanced skill set — including user research, strategy, and business insights — is key to long-term product success

Problem #6: Other Departments Hijacking Product Decisions

A strong PM should guide the product roadmap based on customer needs, business objectives, and market insights. However, in some organizations, other stakeholders and/or teams (e.g. sales, marketing, etc.) take control of key product decisions, often without the same level of user research or strategic insight.

This can result in misaligned priorities, where short-term sales goals override long-term product vision, or engineering constraints dictate roadmap decisions instead of user needs.

Solution: Companies must reinforce the PM’s role as the strategic leader of the product by:

• Encouraging cross-functional collaboration without undermining PM ownership
• Ensuring that major product decisions are made with input from customer data, usability testing, and business strategy
• Providing PMs with the authority to push back when decisions conflict with customer needs

Is Product Management Dead?

I’m afraid the truth is… Product Management already died in most large companies a long time ago. #RIP

The cause of death is leadership’s failure to recognize and fix many of the problems I listed above. And sadly many don’t even realize they have a problem.

Because over time they’ve built a large cult following to their products (and services) where customers keep coming back, regardless of how bad the products are.

Now I’ll share the good news!

I’ve seen a lot of startups embrace good Product Management, along with Agile and Lean methodologies. These startups are the lifeblood of product development, representing an oversized portion of innovation in the technology sector.

Conclusion

For Product leaders at big companies: It’s time to rethink how you build products, because sidelining the PM function isn’t just eroding talent, it’s strangling innovation and dooming your products to mediocrity.

In order for Product Management to rise from the ashes at large organizations, product leaders must:

1. Clearly define the role and differentiate it from project or program management
2. Ensure that PMs can focus on their role and not distracted by wearing too many hats
3. Give PMs the authority they need to lead effectively
4. Align executives with Agile principles and iterative development
5. Balance technical, creative, and business skills based on product needs
6. Ensure PMs lead product strategy rather than being sidelined by other teams

Once these challenges are addressed, Product Management will once agin be a driving force behind innovation and business success.

I always recommend the 20 Product Model First Principles to leaders for guidance in developing and evolving the PM role. The companies that get this right won’t just survive — they’ll outpace the competition with better products and stronger customer relationships.

For PMs navigating these challenges, the key takeaway is this: advocate for clarity in your role, educate stakeholders on the value of strategic product management, and leverage data to influence decisions.

I personally believe the future of Product Management lies entirely in startups. They’re already rewriting the rules, fueling fearless PMs with the autonomy to build empires from endless AI ideas.

The product revolution isn’t coming — it’s already here. Is your organization empowering PMs to lead the charge or are you digging their grave?

The Death of Product Management was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I recently wrote about the 5 powerful business insights that prove the value of design.

While it’s incredible to see the business results on the value of design from McKinsey, Harvard, Forbes, and Adobe, I really appreciate the everyday examples to help illustrate the value of design.

And the creative spark it takes to move a mountain…

The Story of Jacek Utko and His Creative Spark

Jacek Utko is a former architect who got a job as a newspaper art director. He really thought newspapers were boring and bland, and that was easily reflected in the low circulation — nobody was reading them!

He was really frustrated. His parents and friends thought he was crazy wasting his time working at a newspaper.

And the general public thought newspapers would soon become extinct because most people were reading news online. Not to mention most newspapers were outdated by the time they were printed, and environmentalist thought newspapers wasted valuable resources.

But what should he do? He knew that newspapers weren’t appealing to consumers, he just wasn’t sure how to make them better. Or if they could even be saved.

Stepping away from work, he took a trip up to London to attend a Cirque du Soleil performance with some friends.

He was blown away. He told his friends “that they totally transformed a creepy run-down entertainment into performance art!”

This one performance was the creative spark that would ignite a fire in Jacek.

He knew right away that he should use design to transform his newspaper from boring text into performance art.

Just like a Cirque du Soleil performance.

Much like when Einstein was a child and received a magnetic compass as a gift, sparking his lifelong fascination with the invisible forces of nature.

Or Steve Jobs’ being inspired during a calligraphy course at Reed College, where he was captivated by the elegance and beauty of typography. This sparked his passion for design. He embraced design to create beautiful form factors and interfaces in Apple’s products — becoming a unique differentiator from the bland PC computers.

Jacek quickly returned home to Poland to focus his energy on selling leadership on his vision to radically redesign the newspaper into visually engaging and artistic pieces.

The Revolution of Newspaper Design

Jacek worked closely with newspaper executives to figure out the business goals of their papers, and then radically reformatted the product to fit those goals.

Part of the transformation was Jacek’s strategic rethinking the newspaper design, moving away from individual page layouts to seeing the whole newspaper as a single composition.

As the art director at Warsaw’s Puls Biznesu in 2004, he redesigned this small business-focused newspaper and immediately won the SND award for world’s best-designed newspaper. Readers responded, and circulation went up.

It’s clear from these covers that Jacek has completely elevated an old newspaper from static information into dynamic content.

The info graphics that Jacek and his team designed are not just interesting bits of data, but compelling stories that take their readers on a journey.

Jacek and his team got people to notice newspapers again. And quite frankly, the designs he created made newspapers hard to ignore.

People rushed to pick up these redesigned newspapers, often seeing others holding them and curious about the artistry and creativity they saw on the pages.

Jacek sat back in his chair with a smile. He and his team had successfully transformed a newspaper into performance art. What seemed like an impossible dream was now reality.

The Business Results

Utko’s extraordinary design work demonstrates that strategic, user-focused design significantly enhances business performance and reader engagement.

The amount of awards and revenue created by Jacek and his team are inspiring:

• Increased Circulation by Up to 100%: Utko’s redesigns for newspapers in Eastern Europe, including titles in Poland, Russia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Latvia, consistently boosted circulation, with some publications seeing increases of up to 100% due to enhanced visual appeal and reader engagement.
• 35% Circulation Growth in Poland: A Polish newspaper Utko redesigned saw a 35% circulation increase over three years, reversing nearly a decade of stagnation, by aligning design with business goals and reader preferences.
• Boosted Ad Revenue: His redesigns, such as for Bonnier’s business publications, led to increased advertising revenue, often by as much as 100%, by creating visually compelling layouts that attracted advertisers.
• Award-Winning Designs: Utko’s redesigns won the Society of News Design (SND) “World’s Best Designed Newspaper” award in 2004 and 2007 for Warsaw’s Puls Biznesu, enhancing brand prestige and marketability.
• European Newspaper of the Year Awards: Three newspapers he redesigned were recognized as European Newspaper of the Year in 2015, 2016, and 2019, driving higher readership and industry recognition.
• Global Impact Across 35 Countries: Utko’s redesigns for dozens of newspapers and magazines in Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa (e.g., Singapore, South Africa) consistently increased readership and revenue, leveraging strategic design.

Conclusion

Beyond the extraordinary business results from McKinsey, Harvard, Forbes, and Adobe, the world can easily see in this simple example that design has the transformative power as a spark for innovation and a driver of business value.

Jacek not only proved that good design can help readers reconnect with newspapers, but he also proved that good design can bring a dying industry back from the edge of extinction.

And he accomplished this by going beyond just aesthetics by improving the overall product and aligning content and design with a clear strategy. He collaborated with business leaders every step of the way.

Jacek is now an art director for the Bonnier Business Press, overseeing papers in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, and the work he oversees consistently wins major prizes (including another SND world’s-best in 2007 for Estonia’s Äripäev), despite their small teams and limited resources.

The story shows that designers have the power to change not only a product but also the entire workflow and culture of a company.

To all designers and innovators — this is our creative spark! We need to embrace this story and seize the moment to use design to solve the biggest challenges in our organizations. We all need to be like Jacek.

If Jacek can revolutionize the newspaper industry with design, then you can utilize design to revolutionize any industry.

How design radically transformed a dying industry was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

User Research (UR) should be something we all agree on that is critical to building the best digital products. But it’s not, and it seems to get more contentious every year. I’ve had millions of arguments in my career about user research, and I’ve actually argued for and against it.

But now that I’m older and wiser, I’m 100% aligned that user research is critical for product development.

You should be performing User Research for all digital products — new and existing — especially if those products are externally facing with clients, customers, or the general public. Research provides the critical data you need to make informed product decisions around features, usability, and the wants/needs of your target audience.

You’re flying blind without doing any research.

Let’s start by dissecting some old arguments of brilliant innovators who were against doing User Research, and then I’ll share my fool proof argument to help educate and prepare you for the inevitable conversation with leaders who will want to remove User Research to move “faster” and “save money.”

Henry Ford’s argument against user research: revolutionary vs evolutionary products

Henry Ford, the CEO of the Ford Motor Company, guided the production of the Model T car back in 1908 to be the first affordable, easy to operate, and mass-produced car in America. It was an instant success, and Ford often spoke about developing the Model T without research, saying “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

What he was saying is that most people can’t see beyond the products they utilize day-to-day, except the issues they have with them. Customers would likely ask for improvements to existing technology if you ask them about it (i.e. a faster horse) instead of asking for revolutionary new products.

Ford’s argument kinda makes sense, right?

The problem with Ford’s argument is that most of us don’t work on revolutionary new products that ordinary people would have a hard time imagining, let alone understanding.

Most product companies and teams are incrementally improving or evolving current digital products into something slightly better, but rarely working on anything that could be called “revolutionary.” Ford happened to live in an era where everything was revolutionary, so his argument made more sense when he said it in the early 1900’s. There really wasn’t any “technology” prior to that other than the telephone and steam engine, so every invention was considered “revolutionary.”

Even for people who do have incredible jobs that are building extraordinary innovations, there is Design Thinking that will help guide this development with Human Centered Design. They obviously didn’t have this back in the early 1900’s, but it exists today. And it involves lots of user research.

Steve Jobs’ argument against user research: consumers don’t know what they want

The other argument is the famous Steve Jobs quote that “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

This argument also seems pretty straightforward, and is pretty similar to the evolutionary vs revolutionary argument. But the difference here is that this one, is well, uh, utterly idiotic.

Of course people don’t know what you want until you show it to them!

That’s exactly what Agile product development and User Research is for, to quickly show your target audience new product ideas that they hopefully want and need. But to ignore User Research and just launch things into the market blindly is essentially the old Waterfall development method, which left a vast graveyard of failed products in it’s wake.

Most innovation happens within startups, and if you look at the success rate of startups then you’ll realize why innovation is almost impossible without User Research. The fact is 90% of all startups fail, and the #1 reason is because they fail to identify a market for their product and/or service!

That is, startups don’t do enough market or User Research prior to designing, developing, and deploying their product. They dive in, spend a lot of time and money creating a product without talking to users, and then launch it into the market only to watch it fail miserably.

The only argument you need for user research: buying a house

The best way to win arguments about anything is to help people understand it at their level.

For example, it’s a lot easier to prove how extreme the spending is in Congress by simply comparing the federal budget to that of a typical household budget.

This tactic is really valuable, because most of the time you’ll be debating with someone in leadership, or maybe even a product manager (PM) who is trying to speed up the process or save money. So you already have an uphill battle trying to prove the value of research.

The argument for User Research is simple, and it makes it even more powerful if you utilize the Socratic method, which is named after the Athenian philosopher Socrates who used simple questions to challenges ideas and beliefs.

Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, X, Neuralink, and Boring Hole) often uses first principles thinking — which is a form of the Socratic method — by breaking problems down into fundamental truths and then reasoning up from there. This has helped to propel him to become one of the premier innovators of the 21st century in electric vehicles, space travel, and AI.

Here’s a simplified view of how to utilize the Socratic Method:

1. Wonder: Receive what the other person says, listen to their view or premise.
2. Reflect: Sum up the other person’s view and clarify your understanding.
3. Refine & Cross Examine: Ask the person to provide evidence that supports their view. Discover the thoughts, assumptions, and facts underlying their beliefs. Challenge these assumptions to test their validity.
4. Restate: Note the new assumption resulting from your inquiry.
5. Repeat: Start back at the beginning with the new assumptions.

To help illustrate this, imagine someone in leadership asks you to remove User Research from a project to save time and money. Start by listening to their perspective and determining their assumptions as to why they would prefer to remove User Research.

Moving into Step 3 of the Socratic Method where you Redefine and Cross-Examine, you’ll want to challenge their assumptions that User Research is a waste of time and money. Start by asking them if they’ve ever lived in house before? Unless you’re reading this from the Amazon rain forest, I’m hoping that 99% of people you’re going to argue with will say yes.

Next, ask them how many houses they’ve lived in? Just an estimate is fine. Again, most people will say 2–3 houses or more.

Continue diving in further, where you’ll ask them “have you ever bought a house before?” Most people have bought at least one house, if not a few in their lifetime.

Then ask them “How did you buy the house? Did you walk up and buy the first house you saw, or did you do some research first on neighborhoods and then look at a lot of houses within a desired neighborhood? Did you use a realtor to help with this research or did you do it all by yourself?”

And once they admit to getting a realtor, this is where you really dig in… “Wait, you told me you’ve lived in houses your entire life and even bought a home before, which means you’re a certifiable expert on houses, so why did you pay a lot of money to hire a realtor? Why not walk up to the first one you saw and just buy it? Seems like you wasted a lot of time and money on a realtor when you could have done it yourself, riiiiiight?”

Hopefully they’re having an “aha” moment.

They should understand that while our product design and development team is highly experienced, we still need User Researchers to ensure our products meet customer needs while lowering our risk of developing ineffective and/or unusable features.

My final key point in the home buying analogy is that many small and mid-sized companies spend the equivalent of a home purchase ($500,000–$1,000,000) each sprint on product development salaries and overhead. Larger companies like Google invest billions annually in product development!

You wouldn’t risk your life’s savings when buying a house, and so why would companies blindly bet millions or billions every sprint on the chance that their product ideas are successful?

Conclusion

It’s clear that User Research is not up for debate — it’s a foundational practice that ensures digital products are built with purpose, insight, and a clear understanding of your users’ needs. Dismissing it to save time or money is a short-sighted strategy that ultimately leads to wasted resources and failed products.

I’ve always loved the Socratic Method because it provides an invaluable tool in advocating for User Research. By guiding skeptics through their own reasoning — using relatable analogies like buying a house — you can help them realize that research is not an impediment but a catalyst for building better products. Just as no one blindly purchases a home without research or a realtor, no company should blindly develop digital products without understanding their users. Always remember the Nielsen Norman formula, UX — U = X, where “X” now means “don’t do it.”

So the next time someone challenges the need for User Research, don’t just argue — utilize the Socratic Method to ask questions, lead them to the logical conclusion, and let them see for themselves why research is not optional.

Ultimately, the companies that invest in User Research are the ones that create products with real impact while saving time and money in the long run by avoiding unnecessary risks.

User Research is not optional: arguing like Socrates will help you prove it was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In my 25+ years of experience I’ve determined that there’s one key capability that separates good product designers from great designers. And that’s the ability to create extraordinary product visions that are forward thinking, innovative, and can solve your users’ biggest problems.

Creating a vision is more than putting words on paper or developing a roadmap, it’s an idealized view of the experience that users will have with the digital product and experience, and is included in the product roadmap your company follows. It captures the critical elements of the user experience and articulates the “winning idea” by focusing on the experience and downplaying the technology required to build it.

The problem is that most designers don’t know how to be visionary.

They simply follow whatever the Product Manager (PM) tells them as if it’s gospel. They can’t see what’s ahead for their products next month let alone 3–4 years from now. And because of this it will be almost impossible to move up into leadership roles that require demonstrated experience developing powerful visions.

So here’s my top skills that designers need to master to become visionary…

Skill #1: Run Towards Adversity & Uncertainty

Don’t run from adversity and uncertainty. Embrace it.

Remember, adversity is where the creative process starts.

A problem is nothing more than an opportunity to create something better. To see things differently. To discover new paths forward. Don’t let PM’s own the problem space or else you’ll constantly be surprised by your customers’ problems.

Designers should own the user research and spend a lot of time engaging with your customers and diving into all of their problems, from the biggest blockers to the smallest issues.

Another invaluable tool is building a reflex to say yes to any problem or challenge that you hear about at work, regardless of the department. For example, when I worked at E*TRADE I had the VP of Accounting tell me that they didn’t know how to create a risk management strategy for a large Workday integration project.

I blurted out “I can help with that,” without knowing a thing about Workday or risk management.

But I knew the power of Design Thinking.

So I volunteered to help lead an in-person 2-day workshop to develop a risk management strategy, and it was a smashing success! From that moment on I had other leaders approach me directly (instead of going through my boss) about helping to utilize Design Thinking to solve their biggest problems.

You’ll find that embracing adversity & uncertainty while saying yes to big challenges will infinitely reward you in the long run when you can lean on your experience overcoming big challenges for guidance on your current projects. Not to mention when you need to create a holistic vision for a new product.

Skill #2: Learn How to Become a Systems Thinker

It’s super important to be able to understand interrelationships and patterns to help teams identify opportunities and innovate, quickly solve problems, and improve their decision-making. In order to do this you need to ensure your thinking is aligned within your team. And systems thinking is the best way to build this competency.

System 1 Thinking: Our brains’ fast, automatic, unconscious, and emotional response to situations and stimuli. This mode of thinking allows us to make quick decisions and judgments based on patterns and experiences. For me, I often use this to design and/or fix problems at the feature level based on previous work I’ve done in that area. I may pivot to another solution in the process, but not having to start from scratch can be helpful when first starting out.

System 2 Thinking: The slow and logical mode in which our brains operate when solving more complicated problems. This type of thinking is used for complex problem-solving and analytical tasks where more thought and consideration are necessary. For me, this is when I’m developing visions or designs for entire products or platforms. Most of the time I haven’t designed similar apps, and so utilizing old patterns may not work. I usually approach this slowly and methodically utilizing the entire design process, often starting with user research.

It’s critical to understand systems thinking and when to apply it. For example, System 2 thinking is incredible for developing powerful visions because you move from observing events or data, to identifying patterns of behavior, to surfacing the underlying structures that drive those events and patterns.

System 2 thinking will help you to see critical connections and the full context relevant to a product or process. I see many startups fail because they want to move quickly to get to market, often utilizing System 1 thinking to develop a product. But this often leads to failure because they don’t understand the needs of the market or their target audience.

Skill #3: Enhance Your Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

I’ve noticed that visionary designers also have higher levels of emotional intelligence (EQ), which makes it easier for us to empathize with customers by engaging, listening, and learning from them; which is the secret to building awesome products.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others. It is generally said to include four core skills: emotional self-awareness, social awareness (empathy), self-management (motivation), and relationship management (social skills).

Emma Seppälä has taught emotional intelligence to thousands of leaders at the Yale School of Management and witnessed the transformative effect it can have on a person’s success. She provides three exercises to quickly boost your emotional intelligence:

Exercise 1: Tap Into Your Self-Awareness in Two Minutes

When you interact with someone in a way you later regret, it’s usually not intentional. You just failed to be self-aware.

Self-awareness is the ability to be conscious of what is happening in your mind — Am I upset? Am I tired? — and not falling prey to reactivity or impulsive behavior when someone pushes your buttons.

There is a dedicated part of our brain that pays attention to our internal state through a process neuroscientists call interoception, and there’s a simple exercise to develop self-awareness by helping you immediately tap into that part of your brain and boost your self-awareness.

Sit down, close your eyes, and focus inward. Then do these three steps:

• Step 1: Observe the state (e.g. hungry, tired, relaxed, etc.) of your body
• Step 2: Take note of your thoughts and their “traffic level” (e.g. few, some, many)
• Step 3: Notice your emotions

Exercise 2: Self-Regulate with Your Breath

There’s numerous research studies that show breathing exercises are one of the most effective and fastest ways to handle emotions in real time by calming you in just a couple of minutes.

She recommends this exercise to lengthen your exhalations because it will activate your parasympathetic nervous system to help you rest by slowing your heart rate: Close your eyes and breathe in for a count of four and out for a count of eight for a minimum of two minutes.

This can help before presenting to the senior leadership team or when you’re trying to stay patient in a frustrating meeting.

Exercise 3: Forge Connections with Special Uplifting Moments

Ever noticed how some people can leave you feeling drained, tired, and down? While after interacting with a “positive energizer” you feel hopeful, uplifted, and energized?

Studies have shown that positive energizers not only have a positive impact on our wellbeing, but they are also capable of creating super-productivity in organizations. Highly emotionally intelligent people know how to create positivity in a values-driven way: They do it with humility, empathy, compassion, honesty, integrity, and forgiveness.

Emma recommends seeing every interaction as an opportunity to leave the other person feeling uplifted. It takes less than a minute to share a compliment, a laugh, a compassionate word, or even a smile. This not only leaves the other person feeling better, but you’ll feel better too!

Skill #4: Sketching for Ideation and Solving Problems

Sketching is not only my favorite medium for ideation and envisioning new solutions, but it’s also great for solving problems. While technology is great for execution, it severely limits your creativity when ideating. Instead, I’ve found that sketching is ideal because it’s quick and easy to develop 10–20 low fidelity concepts on my own in a very short period of time.

I learned this skill by studying the work of world renown master artist Leonardo da Vinci. While he was known as an extraordinary artist, inventor, architect, and engineer, he mastered his craft by constantly following his curiosity and attempting to explain his observations by filling over 13,000 pages of journals with drawings and experiments.

He recorded his observations, looked for patterns among them, and then tested those patterns through additional observation and experimentation.

From this we know that he was among the very first to take a scientific approach towards understanding how our world works and how we see it. Follow these 6 steps to utilize sketching for ideation and problem solving like Leonardo da Vinci:

Step #1: Find a Place to Engage Your Imagination

I find the best creative environments are comfortable, quiet, and have objects & toys that spark my imagination and allow my creativity to dream and explore. If you need to jumpstart your creativity, I recommend some light exercise (e.g. walking, yoga, etc.) or reviewing competitors’ products, inspiring photos of the theme you’re tackling, and even playing with creative toys (e.g. Lego bricks, silly putty, comics, games, etc.) to get the juices flowing.

Step #2: Pick a Specific Problem

To help focus your creativity, I recommend picking a specific problem that you want to solve. Or if you haven’t found a specific problem, consider starting more broadly with a theme or topic and to ideate on the problems in that area, and then pick a specific problem.

Step #3: Sketch Lots of Ideas in 5–10 Minutes

Starting with a specific problem, I recommend letting your pen/pencil be the vessel to document, organize, and design anything from strategy to design to user flows. Sketch as many ideas and solutions as you can within 5–10 minutes.

Not all of your sketches will be revolutionary ideas, but that’s not quite the point.

The point is to have a ton of various thoughts to work from and build upon. From these concepts a few gold nuggets should emerge as you continue iterating.

Step #4: Annotate Your Sketches

I’ve found it’s super helpful to add notes to your sketches to help define the details of a specific solution (e.g. titles, keywords, callouts, questions, interactions, user types, etc.).

Step #5: Collaborate With Others When You Sketch

Consider collaborating with colleagues or friends in this exercise to help push the boundaries of your creativity. Once you both finish your first round of sketches, share your sketches and provide feedback to each other.

Then spend another 5–10 minutes sketching more ideas based off the feedback. This also works great to ideate within a team or client setting because everyone can sketch, no Leonardo da Vinci’s required.

Step #6: Look for New Combinations

Review your ideas/solution that you sketched, pick the best aspects of each one, and then spend another 5–10 minutes sketching a new set of ideas/solutions. Continue iterating until you find the best idea/solution that solves your problem.

Sketching Exercises:

Try it on your own by sketching ideas and solutions for these thought exercises, spending no more than 5–10 minutes on each exercise:

• How would you improve your favorite social media app (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, etc.)?
• What issues do you have with your email (e.g. Gmail, Outlook, etc.) experience and how would you improve it to make it more user friendly?
• How would you innovate your favorite mobile app using AI?

Skill #5: Develop Your Visual Thinking

Most designers (and PM’s) are only able to visualize entirely new products and platforms once they’ve completed the entire design process, often taking months — or even years — to get to the point they have confidence sharing their designs.

However, the best designers I know can easily visualize complete systems from end-to-end before they start the design process.

Designers are intellectually curious with a deep and persistent desire to know and constantly ask “why?” One of our primary advantages in learning and ideation is that we’re visual thinkers, where we think through situations, information & data, and problems by visualizing them in our minds.

Most people are overwhelmed by the unlimited data and information that surrounds us everyday, and yet it’s important for designers to be able to leverage this ability as visual thinkers to organize large amounts of data, which improves our ability to think, communicate, and convey complex information.

Some of the best athletes in the world utilize visualization techniques to envision successful outcomes before a game, and it often gives them a competitive edge.

Same for designers in just about any creative endeavor, especially creating product visions, where we can easily develop new products and feature ideas simply by visualizing them in our minds!

For me, I was able to develop this skill after a few years of practicing — and then mastering — sketching and creating wireframes, where I could then do this quickly in my mind. The key is to practice this skill by giving yourself problems to solve or redesign websites or apps to make them more usable. It may take a little longer than sketching, but allow your mind a week to continue to pull and shape your mental models, perceptions, and data into innovative concepts and solutions.

I tend to do this continuously even after I’ve left work and I’m not consciously focused on the problem, where my subconscious mind continues to design and iterate! I’ve even developed solutions in my dreams to complex problems and managed to wake up and scribble ideas down. It’s an extraordinary capability that allows me to quickly develop product and feature level solutions, as well as end-to-end visions of entire systems.

Once you’ve mastered this skill, you will no longer see a blank canvas but full-scale solutions without having to understand — or be constrained — by the limitations of technology.

Skill #6: The Power of Storytelling

I wrote about the power of storytelling as an “ancient and universal force that transcends cultures and spans generations, and ‘is the way knowledge and understanding have been passed down for millennia’ notes the famous author & speaker Simon Sinek. It’s a fundamental aspect of human communication, weaving narratives that connect individuals and communities worldwide. We can trace the origins of storytelling back thousands of years to some of the earliest forms of human communication, from prehistoric cave paintings to oral traditions.”

Just like branding, painting, or any other creative endeavor, I’ve found the best way to create a vision is to start with prose to better engage the free flow of your thoughts and deepen your connection to the vision exercise.

Succinctly detailing your vision in a story will make it tangible for leaders, stakeholders, and even your customers. It’s an extraordinary way to communicate design concepts because they focus on the user’s experience with your product while downplaying the implementation details. This means the “winning idea” is self-evident while being technology agnostic.

Skill #7: Build Your Design Thinking Muscles

I highly recommend utilizing a Design Thinking workshop if you ever need to collaborate with a team to create a vision together.

Design Thinking utilizes elements from our toolkit like empathy, integrative thinking, and experimentation to provide evidence that informs the process, so that we can make design decisions based on what customers want instead of relying only on historical data or making risky bets based on instinct.

A key component of Design Thinking is workshops because they’re highly collaborative sessions or series of sessions where designers, stakeholders, and other relevant team members come together to explore, ideate, and solve design challenges.

Here’s the steps to lead a product vision workshop…

1. Develop a product vision statement

I recommend having every person develop their own product vision (using the product vision template below), and then give everyone a few minutes to read through them and vote on the best ones. Work together as a group to try and combine the top 3 product visions into a single product vision.

2. Persona interviews

The next step is to conduct user interviews with your primary customers in order to check your assumptions that you made in the working product vision statement. This will also help you to better engage with your customers and develop empathy with them. From these interviews you will create the user personas that you’ll refer to throughout the workshop.

3. Elevator pitch descriptors

This step requires you to ideate on your product’s defining qualities and decide on a key differentiator that will make your product unique and help drive user adoption. Have everyone create an elevator pitch require that summarizes in 1–2 minutes what makes your product valuable in a short and direct way.

4. Storyboarding

With the team bought in on your users’ needs and product differentiator, the final question is determining how. Have everyone create storyboards that chronologically visualize how users might use your product. These creative scenarios uncover aspirational ideas for the product’s future.

Conclusion

Creatives who are able to utilize all of the above skills — embracing adversity & uncertainty while mastering sketching, storytelling, visual thinking, emotional intelligence, systems thinking, and design thinking — are able to create compelling visions that solve problems with ingenious solutions.

With that said, it will take a lot of hard work to become a visionary designer. I suggest that it’s roughly 10,000 hours — or 10 years — of late nights and lots of blood, sweat, and tears. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. So don’t shy away from the hard work. Embrace it.

Part of this process is being open to all opportunities in the various fields of product design (e.g. UX, UI, IxD, etc.) and even other fields of design (e.g. advertising, print, animation, etc.) to help you gain valuable experience that’s not one dimensional. This will also help guide your thinking in determining what you do and don’t want to do in your career.

The best designers I’ve worked with have multi-faceted backgrounds, are adept at solving big problems, and can quickly envision the next pivot via new product extension/capabilities, new markets, new segments, etc. They’re constantly looking into the market and seeing unaddressed customer problems and the gaps between existing technologies. They’re great to work with and the first ones I like to promote into leadership roles.

Vision is innovation. Thinking different. It’s the ability to see opportunities where others see problems, to visualize something from nothing, to turn complex ideas & data into simple solutions, and to passionately solve the world’s biggest problems with creativity.

That is what it means for designers to be visionary.

Mastering the Art of Visionary Design: Skills You Need to Succeed was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2024, I’m predicting dynamic and adaptive interfaces utilizing AI will become the cornerstone of personalized user experiences, and designers will become more enlightened this year as we advance ecological and social sustainability in our designs.

We continue to elevate our designs with liquid & dynamic gradients, powerful storytelling inspired by Pixar, and we’ll tackle complexity with Object-Oriented User Experience (OOUX) process.

Let’s launch the new year with some awesomeness in design trends ahead for 2024!

01. Personalized User Experiences Utilizing Adaptive & Contextual AI

I’m predicting in 2024 that dynamic and adaptive interfaces will become the cornerstone of personalized user experiences, where you’ll see more experiences that not only adapt to user preferences and devices but also to environmental factors like day/night, seasonal/weather patterns, lighting levels, noise/sound levels, pollution, people density/traffic, and much more. This approach marks a transformative change in design philosophy, emphasizing hyper-personalized, context-sensitive interactions. It’s also particularly important in creating inclusive designs that cater to a diverse range of users with different needs and preferences, making technology more accessible and user-friendly for everyone.

I personally love this new tool in the designer toolkit, where it’s fun to think of all of the rich and dynamic experiences we can create for our users!

Imagine a person using a reading app that adjusts its background and text size based on the ambient light or a music app that changes its interface based on the tempo of the song being played. Or even a travel/hotel app that adjusts its color scheme based on the user’s location to match the local culture.

For designers, the best way to create these extraordinary experiences is to explore the space between Dynamic UI, Adaptive UI, Intelligent UI, and Contextual UX.

Dynamic UI

Dynamic user interfaces (also known as dynamic UI’s), are web pages generated dynamically according to the specifications of an existing page definition. These interfaces are initiated solely through a portlet utilizing the Dynamic UI Manager API. Due to their dynamic nature, these interfaces are not permanently stored in the portal database and are only active for the duration of the user’s session with the portal. Additionally, users have the option to close the interface before the session concludes, either programmatically or manually.

I think the awesome thing about Dynamic UI’s is the number of use cases one could have for mobile & wearable devices, where they track all sorts of measurements. For example, the Apple Watch has several health trackers apps can utilize around temperature, sleep, ECG, heart health, and blood oxygen levels.

Adaptive UI

Adaptive design was introduced by Aaron Gustafson, and refers to interfaces that modify themselves in real-time based on individual user behavior, preferences, and context. These interfaces employ machine learning algorithms and data analytics to deliver a personalized user experience. In other words, the interface learns from the user and adapts accordingly.

Please make sure you don’t confuse Adaptive with Responsive design. The key difference is that Responsive design reconfigures the same web-based content for optimal reading on different devices, where Adaptive design is about tailoring the content & layout to be optimal to each device and user.

Intelligent UI

Intelligent user interfaces use artificial intelligence technologies and machine learning to create personalized experiences for users, with the goal of improving the user’s performance or usability. The technology is used to understand and interpret the user’s intentions and context before providing a tailored or guided experience.

Some examples of intelligent user interfaces could be chatbots, voice assistants, and recommendation systems. One of the more popular executions of this type of technology is personalization engines which are now embedded into many enterprise solutions.

Contextual UX

Contextual UX involves using context-aware technologies to tailor personalized experiences based on specific user situations or contexts. Understanding explicit and implicit interaction concepts in human-computer interaction (HCI) is crucial for effectively exploring this concept.

In today’s connected world, we’re shifting towards contextual UX from task-oriented UX, where systems adapt to user needs based on factors like location. This shift allows for the creation of sophisticated, adaptive systems delivering real-time personalized experiences, often termed the “internet of things” or “ubiquitous computing.” To be successful with contextual UX, it requires systems to adapt to user needs based on situational context, such as a shopping app providing real-time assistance during checkout. Additionally, designers must consider the context effect in UX, ensuring products cater to users’ behaviors and environments, whether on mobile or desktop platforms.

Putting It All Together

Designing personalized user experiences utilizing adaptive and contextual AI involves collaboration between designers, data scientists, and developers. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how designers can contribute to the process:

1. Collaborate across design, data science, and development teams
2. Understand user needs and goals
3. Define personalization goals
4. Identify data sources
5. Design personalization models
6. Prototype personalized experiences
7. Iterate based on user feedback
8. Ensure accessibility and inclusivity
9. Monitor and measure performance

By following these steps and adopting a user-centered approach, designers can play a crucial role in designing personalized user experiences that leverage adaptive and contextual AI to enhance user engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.

02. Object-Oriented UX (OOUX)

This trend of Object-oriented User Experience (OOUX) is more about improving your design process, which will then help you to simplify the design of complex information architecture, navigation, and user experiences. Specifically, this process will help Information Architects (IA) to object map a system that has tens if not hundreds of legitimately important objects that have complex relationships with one another, but it’s good knowledge for all designers to know how to design for complexity.

OOUX facilitates the creation of circular and context-sensitive navigation systems by establishing connections between various elements, forming a network akin to a “spiderweb” rather than a traditional linear or tree-like structure. And OOUX emphasizes promoting heterarchies, where elements are not hierarchically ranked, allowing for endless possibilities in how they can be organized and accessed.

This is important because we often shy away from complexity by oversimplifying, or worse by adding more complexity to an already exponentially difficult design problem where you need to solve for a massive amount of information & data, multiple user types & goals, multiple devices, multiple regions, and other complexities. Failure to wrangle this complexity can result in awful experiences as well as a loss of customers and revenue.

Key Benefits of Object-Oriented UX

The OOUX process can provide tons of benefits to your business, customers, and employees in a number of ways:

• Improve customer experience by helping customers and employees quickly find what they are looking for
• Eliminate friction by aligning objects and information with users’ already-established contextual associations
• Help customers to use navigation to explore content vs a way to reset their experience when they get lost
• Establish your brand as premium with a seamless experiences, which gives customers and employees the impression that your products and services are high quality
• Guide your internal team to make better decisions about the organization of information

When to Use OOUX

Use OOUX when there are too many objects to force a hierarchy, or when a system is incredibly complicated and may include constantly-shifting situational contexts and desires. Remember that both of these will require a flexible heterarchy that thrives on:

• Spiderwebs over tree branches
• Circular and contextual design
• Associations between things

I’ve seen this process work well for the design & development of many platform and backend applications that typically have more complexity. For example, call center customer service interfaces, CRM, online shopping experiences, and others. The OOUX process can easily help you to both simplify existing systems and to design for new complexity.

How to Implement OOUX

1. Extract objects
2. Define the content for each object
3. Cross-link or nest objects and create associations
4. Add actions/verbs to each object
5. Prioritize object modules, keep them centralized
6. Design, build, deploy, test, iterate, add, subtract, repeat

03. Liquid/Fluid Gradients & Animated Gradients

Gradients are not new to online experiences, but often in the past gradients were static and had just two or three colors. Moving into 2024 I’m predicting we’ll see more complexity with liquid gradients, gradients combined with content, as well as gradients with 5+ colors and dynamic animations.

I’ve always loved gradients because they create an illusion of movement while enhancing a minimalist design, and adding animation can further enhance the experience, even more so by making it user-interactive to drive engagement.

However, the power of complex and animated gradients goes beyond visceral appeal — it taps into the psychology of color. As I mentioned in a previous post on Emotional Design, that “it’s critically important to focus on crafting a visceral design that makes users feel delighted and excited. You have to understand what motivates them. Understand their wants and needs. And then craft a visual experience that will tug at their heart strings, where their emotions do the deciding.”

Various colors elicit diverse emotions and associations, and by combining these hues it enables designers to establish a particular mood or communicate a message nonverbally.

I really love this gradient trend because it’s extremely versatile. It can be bold or subtle, the focal point of a design or a background element. And because you can mix and blend different shades of color, gradients can create new color combinations that feel different and modern, lending a completely unique feel to designs. I added a few free tutorials below so you can learn how to master the ability to create liquid gradients in your designs:

• Learn how to create liquid gradients in Photoshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG4-03pDFw8
• Create liquid gradients with Spline (Figma plugin):
  https://spline.design/
• Learn how to create liquid gradients with After Effects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Mpbn-Zx2aWs

04. Sustainable Design

As designers, we wield considerable influence in advancing ecological and social sustainability, and it’s imperative that we harness this power effectively.

Sustainable UX and UI design must encompass considerations for both environmental and societal aspects. It requires us designers to be thoughtful in minimizing adverse effects on our environment and communities while maximizing positive contributions to both.

One great method to dig deeper is with the donut diagram, which represents social foundations in its inner circle and ecological boundaries on its outer rim.

Minimizing the negative impact of UI/UX

UX Design: To reduce our CO² and energy impact of UX, we can help by using less images, less videos, turning off auto-play videos, less interactions, and less other data-heavy components. I recommend utilizing lazy loading instead of publishing hundreds of images, or perhaps consider reducing the number of push notifications to just the critical ones, etc.

UI Design: To reduce our environmental impact of UI, we can explore innovative approaches with lightweight elements like icons, illustrations, shapes, forms, and colors. Sustainable UI practices also involve optimizing, scaling, and compressing images and videos to minimize data usage. Consistency in UI elements is essential, including considerations for the quantity and variety of fonts utilized, with preference given to preinstalled system fonts or compressed font files. Additionally, ecological UI design emphasizes the use of energy-efficient color palettes and OLED monitors.

Maximizing the positive impact of UI/UX

To maximize the positive impact of UI & UX, focus on designing for great usability, easy to understand content, intuitive short click paths, green delivery options, packaging-free variants, including CO² displays in web shops, promoting sustainable products, fuel-efficient travel routes, sustainable default options, and many more.

05. Powerful Storytelling

As designers, your digital experiences need to not only survive — but thrive — amongst the billions of apps & websites competing for your customers’ attention. To do this, it’s critically important to carefully design and build an experience that captures the heart & soul of your customers. So how do we promote effective communication that acknowledges both the speaker and the listener? How do we foster deeper connections, tapping into your customers’ emotions, ambitions, and values?

The answer is simple: storytelling

The power of storytelling is an ancient and universal force that transcends cultures and spans generations, and “is the way knowledge and understanding have been passed down for millennia” notes the famous author & speaker Simon Sinek. It’s a fundamental aspect of human communication, weaving narratives that connect individuals and communities worldwide. We can trace the origins of storytelling back thousands of years to some of the earliest forms of human communication, from prehistoric cave paintings to oral traditions.

Utilize Pixar’s 6 Rules for Creating Powerful Stories

Pixar is at the pinnacle of storytelling prowess, delighting audiences of all ages with narratives that transcend the boundaries of animation. For designers who want embrace all of Pixar’s storytelling magic, I’ll walk you through Pixar’s 6 rules for creating powerful stories so you can apply them to your work…

Rule 1: Great stories are universal

The first rule is that the most epic stories are universal, where anyone can understand it and relate to it. Think about love stories, good vs evil, the underdog, and so on.

Rule 2: Great stories have a clear structure and purpose

Story structure is a critical element to developing a succinct storyline, where Pixar has used their patented story framework to create most of the films that we know and love today:

Once upon a time, there was _____.
Every day, _____.
One day _____.
Because of that, _____.
Until finally _____.

Rule 3: Great stories have a character to root for (an underdog)

Believe it or not, people want to root for the main character.

And there’s nothing like a good underdog to hype up audiences!

Rule 4: Great stories appeal to our deepest emotions

Psychologists generally agree that there are six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise.

Consciously being to recognize these various emotions in yourself — and think about the “why” of your emotions.

Rule 5: Great stories are surprising and unexpected

Surprising your audience in fun and unexpected ways is a must for a great story. And not just the classic fairytale storyline where prince charming saves the princess in need. You have to challenge yourself to dig deep and challenge or change common perceptions and stereotypes.

Rule 6: Great stories are simple and focused

We the viewers know a good story when we see or hear one. As storytellers, you’ll often find yourself adding more and more layers that don’t need to be there. Because as I mentioned in my post on why designing simple experiences is psychologically impossible, humans love complexity. This is called complexity bias, where our brains actually reward complexity.

06. Ethical and Privacy-focused Design Practices

2024 will bring a significant shift towards transparency and user empowerment due to the growing awareness and concerns around data privacy and ethical design. This includes clear data usage policies, easy-to-navigate privacy settings, and designs that encourage informed consent practices.

We designers have a moral and ethical obligation to be good stewards of our design expertise in crafting experiences that will not only resonate with our customers, but will also respect and prioritize their health & security online. Design for them as you would design for yourself. This includes safeguarding their data, rights, and privacy in both the physical world as well as the online world.

Our design choices influence how user data is collected, processed, and utilized, where we should be knowledgeable around the ethical considerations and desired outcomes. This requires us to be thoughtful about the implication of every color, button placement, and interaction has beyond the visual realm.

This may require us to push back on the leadership to “speed up the process to hit this deadline,” or a more balanced approach in working with our business partners who want to squeeze every penny out of our customers.

Take the time and space to be transparent with your customers because it’s the foundation of ethical design.

Clearly communicate to users how their data will be collected, used, and stored. This builds trust and empowers users to make informed choices.

07. Zero UI

I’ve explored various aspects of this trend in the past, where it continues to gain steam around the concept of an ideal interface, well, having no interface at all. Whenever we use new mobile apps, there’s a certain learning curve that takes time to become familiar with the technology. By contrast, Zero UI has no interface and therefore no learning curve.

We simply use our humanness to interact with an application via our voices, gestures, facial expressions, and touching. No instructions required!

As ambient computing and IoT devices become more pervasive, designers may explore Zero UI experiences where interactions occur seamlessly in the background without explicit user input, relying on contextual cues and automation to anticipate and fulfill user needs.

Siri voice assistant, virtual reality glasses, Face ID, smart speakers, fitness trackers, and smart home systems are all harbingers of a new era — the era of devices with zero interfaces, Zero UI.

08. WebGL + 3D + Motion Effects

The integration of 3D elements within UI design is experiencing rapid growth, fundamentally altering the user experience across digital platforms. This growth is largely due to WebGL, which is a JavaScript API that uses in-browser HTML5 to draw 2D and 3D graphics. It’s a subsidiary of OpenGL and does not rely on any external plugins.

These experiences will drive high engagement and build relationships with your customers, while helping to increase conversion. Some example include 3D objects, illustrations, transitions/animations, and interactive 3D objects, creating visually engaging and immersive user experiences.

I anticipate we’ll see this expansion beyond crypto and ecommerce domains in 2024, extending into educational applications, virtual event platforms, and even commonplace tools such as calendars and fitness applications.

The depth and authenticity afforded by 3D designs foster an immersive sensation that amplifies user interaction, rendering routine activities more pleasurable and intricate tasks more intuitive.

Furthermore, this trend is fueling advancements in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) environments, where 3D elements serve as pivotal conduits, bridging the gap between virtual and physical realms.

09. Algorithmic grids

Algorithmic grids are part of the trends that we will see in 2024, where you can divide a long read into several logical areas with an invisible grid to help control the viewer’s attention. These grids have evolved into intelligent frameworks that guide the user’s eye through content seamlessly and intuitively.

There are 7 basic algorithmic grids that you can use to design web pages. The ‘ladder’ grid supports the diagonal eye movement of the viewer’s eyes, while the ‘comb’ grid features higher vertical blocks that offer a unique visual rhythm to the layout. These grids are not just about structure; they are about guiding user engagement subtly yet effectively.

The challenge is that there are no strict rules about how many areas you should create, where you regard the long read as a chain of blocks with equal importance. I recommend the use of spacing, size variations, and color contrasts to prevent user confusion while ensuring a smooth and engaging journey through the content.

10. Non-Standard & Asymmetrical Layouts

I admit this trend can sometimes give you hipster vibes, where they’re obviously trying too hard to stand out from the crowd. Just seeing zig-zag alignment included vertical, horizontal, or even stair-step structures can be overpowering and hard to follow. And certainly this approach might not work for large content companies or creators, but it’s honestly great at creating more niche memorable online experiences.

By departing from conventional symmetrical boxy layouts, asymmetrical design introduces an element of imbalance. This approach frequently embodies modernism, characterized by its inventive utilization of space and color. Successfully implementing asymmetry hinges on the ability to harmoniously combine contrasting elements to create visually compelling compositions. Here’s a few tips I recommend to guide you in this process:

• Add focal points. Focal points are the areas within a design that capture the viewer’s gaze. You can create focal points by varying the color, texture, and size of different asymmetrical elements within your design. Adding these types of striking features to your design can differentiate the foreground and background for the viewer.
• Create visual balance. Although asymmetrical layouts strive to create irregular and disproportionate outlines, they still emphasize balance. With a balanced design, the visual weight of the varying colors, objects, and textures is stable, allowing the viewer’s eye to take in the space without feeling overwhelmed. You can create balance by playing with color, counteracting a large object with blank space, changing typography, or expressing movement in the design. Consider also using a grid to determine whether your have a balanced digital design.
• Integrate contrasting colors. Another aspect of asymmetrical balance is using contrasting colors to guide the viewer’s attention. Contrasting colors are colors positioned on opposite sides of the color wheel. Examples of these color pairings include red and green, blue and orange, and purple and yellow. In your asymmetrical design, incorporate light and dark colors to highlight certain areas of your design.
• Use movement and white space. Incorporating movement into your design is another way to guide the human eye to a central point. For example, if you’re designing a homepage for a website, consider using movement in your design to influence user attention, encouraging visitors to click on additional links and pages. Playing with white space can also help structure the movement in your graphic or website design. Rather than using the traditional grid system for your UI design, incorporate negative space into your web pages to send users to key points. Balancing your design with white space is also a great way to improve the user experience, as it prevents site visitors from getting overwhelmed by extra links, boxes, and web pages.

Conclusion

As we step into 2024, the UI/UX design trends we’ve explored signal a transformative era in digital interaction. These trends go beyond aesthetic appeal, focusing on creating empathetic, inclusive, and ethically responsible digital experiences. They aim to make technology more intuitive, personalized, and aligned with the user’s well-being.

The future of UI/UX is set to redefine our digital interactions, making them more human-centric and environmentally conscious. As designers continue to innovate, users can anticipate a more connected and engaging digital world that respects privacy and caters to diverse needs. In short, 2024 is poised to be a landmark year where design meets human touch, reimagining our interaction with technology in profound and meaningful ways.

I’d love to get your feedback on this post as well as any new trends in UX/UI design you’re predicting we’ll see this year. And don’t forget to go back and revisit my design trends of the past: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019

The Most Popular Experience Design Trends of 2024 was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.