Jakob Nielsen

The reason companies pay for design is to get customers to buy more and users to look at more advertisements.

The winning system of the next decade will not be the one with the most aesthetically pleasing buttons, nor will it be the one with the fewest screens. It will be the system that best understands the human’s “job to be done,” autonomously selects the right tools on their behalf, clearly shows the user what is about to happen, and gracefully recovers when the user’s context is incomplete or ambiguous.

In the world of high-stakes digital strategy, the “average user” is a dangerous statistical artifact.

So no, UX doesn’t die; it metamorphoses. We’ll still craft humane experiences, but increasingly through policies, protocols, and orchestrations rather than panels and palettes.

UX design has been steadily improving over the last 50 years and is now reasonably good. The low-hanging fruit of terrible usability has long since been picked.

The new trend toward vibe coding and vibe design may be upending the user-centered design paradigm that has remained based on the same ideology since the first UX design projects at Bell Labs, starting in 1947.

Vibe coding can execute instructions, but deciding what the software should do and why is not automated. Product managers and designers must still do user research, market analysis, and creative brainstorming. In that sense, vibe coding changes the implementation phase more than the planning phase of the product lifecycle.

Essentially, vibe coding makes it trivial to create front-end code, so designers can skip static mockups and go straight to building a UI that works.

In a vibe coding future, companies will hopefully invest more in understanding user needs, refining the interface, and polishing details that delight users, because those are harder for AI to get right without guidance.

Once, humans navigated the web manually. In the future, AI agents will act on our behalf, browsing, clicking, and deciding. This shift marks the end of traditional UI design and accessibility, ushering in a future where agents are the primary users of digital services.

When a team of 10 AI-enabled super-designers can do the work that used to require a UX department of 100, the need for higher management levels shrivels. I call this the “pancaking” of the design profession.

Right now, they can make simple social media posts for small companies and individual influencers. Two years from now, they can make simple campaigns and tradeshow collateral for mid-sized businesses. And in 10 years, I bet that even the richest brand will rely heavily on these tools.

I foresee a much more radical approach to generative UI to emerge shortly — maybe in 5 years or so. In this second-generation generative UI, the user interface is generated afresh every time the user accesses the app. Most important, this means that different users will get drastically different designs.

Accessibility has failed as a way to make computers usable for disabled users. My metrics for usable design are the same whether the user is disabled or not: whether it’s easy to learn the system, whether productivity is high when performing tasks, and whether the design is pleasant — even enjoyable — to use.

GUIs have superior usability because they show people what can be done rather than requiring them to articulate what they want.

For sure, half the population is insufficiently articulate in writing to use ChatGPT well.

Thus, the 2nd UI paradigm will survive, albeit in a less dominant role. Future AI systems will likely have a hybrid user interface that combines elements of both intent-based and command-based interfaces while still retaining many GUI elements.

I doubt that the current set of generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, Bard, etc., are representative of the UIs we’ll be using in a few years because they have deep-rooted usability problems.

The third UI paradigm, represented by current generative AI, is intent-based outcome specification. The user tells the computer the desired result but does not specify how this outcome should be accomplished, such as the steps to be executed. Compared to traditional command-based interaction design, this completely reverses the locus of control.