Design’s Purpose Remains Constant

Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga, in their annual The State of UX report:

Despite all the transformations we’re seeing, one thing we know for sure: Design (the craft, the discipline, the science) is not going anywhere. While Design only became a more official profession in the 19th century, the study of how craft can be applied to improve business dates back to the early 1800s. Since then, only one thing has remained constant: how Design is done is completely different decade after decade. The change we’re discussing here is not a revolution, just an evolution. It’s simply a change in how many roles will be needed and what they will entail. “Digital systems, not people, will do much of the craft of (screen-level) interaction design.”

Scary words for the UX design profession as it stares down the coming onslaught of AI. Our industry isn’t the first one to face this—copywriters, illustrators, and stock photographers have already been facing the disruption of their respective crafts. All of these creatives have had to pivot quickly. And so will we.

Teixeira and Braga remind us that “Design is not going anywhere,” and that “how Design is done is completely different decade after decade.”

UX Is a Relatively Young Discipline

If you think about it, the UX design profession has already evolved significantly. When I started in the industry as a graphic designer in the early 1990s, web design wasn’t a thing, much less user experience design. I met my first UX design coworker at marchFIRST, when Chris Noessel and I collaborated on Sega.com. Chris had studied at the influential Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy. If I recall correctly, Chris’ title was information architect as UX designer wasn’t a popular title yet. Regardless, I marveled at how Chris used card sorting with Post-It notes to determine the information architecture of the website. And together we came up with the concept that the website itself would be a game, obvious only to visitors who paid attention. (Alas, that part of the site was never built, as we simply ran out of time. Oh, the dot-com days were fun.)

“User experience” was coined by Don Norman in the mid-1990s. When he joined Apple in 1993, he settled on the title of “user experience architect.” In an email interview with Peter Merholz in 1998, Norman said:

I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual. Since then the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to lose its meaning.

As the thirst for all things digital proliferated, design rose to meet the challenge. Design schools started to add interaction design to their curricula, and lots of younger graphic designers were adapting and working on websites. We used the tools we knew—Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop—and added Macromedia Director and Flash as projects allowed.

Director was the tool of choice for those making CD-ROMs in San Francisco’s Multimedia Gulch in the early 1990s. It was an easy transition for designers and developers when the web arrived just a few years later in the dot-com boom.

In a short span of twenty years, designers added many mediums to their growing list: CD-ROMs, websites, WAP sites, responsive websites, mobile apps, tablet apps, web apps, and AR/VR experiences.

Designers have had to understand the limitations of each medium, picking up craft skills, and learning best practices. But I believe, good designers have had one thing remain constant: they know how to connect businesses with their audiences. They’re the translation layer, if you will. (Notice how I have not said how to make things look good.)

From Concept to Product Strategy

Concept. Back then, that’s how I referred to creative strategy. It was drilled into me at design school and in my first job as a designer. Sega.com was a game in and of itself to celebrate gamers and gaming. Pixar.com was a storybook about how Pixar made its movies, emphasizing its storytelling prowess. The Mitsubishi Lancer microsite leaned on the Lancer’s history as a rally car, reminding visitors of its racing heritage. These were all ideas that emotionally connected the brand with the consumer, to lean on what the audience knew to be true and deepened it.

When I designed Pixar.com, I purposefully made the site linear, like a storybook.

Concept was also the currency of creative departments at ad agencies. The classic copywriter and art director pairing came up with different ideas for ads. These ideas aren’t just executions of TV commercials. Instead, they were the messages the brands wanted to convey, in a way that consumers would be open to them.

I would argue that concept is also product strategy. It’s the point of view that drives a product—whether it’s a marketing website, a cryptocurrency mobile app, or a vertical SaaS web app. Great product strategy connects the business with the user and how the product can enrich their lives. Enrichment can come in many forms. It can be as simple as saving users a few minutes of tedium, or transforming an analog process into a digital one, therefore unlocking new possibilities.

UI Is Already a Commodity

In more recent years, with the rise of UI kits, pre-made templates, and design systems like Material UI, the visual design of user interfaces has become a commodity. I call this moment “peak UI”—when fundamental user interface patterns have reached ubiquity, and no new patterns will or should be invented. Users take what they know from one interface and apply that knowledge to new ones. To change that is to break Jakob’s Law and reduce usability. Of course, when new modalities like voice and AI came on the scene, we needed to invent new user interface patterns, but those are few and far between.

And just like how AI-powered coding assistants are generating code based on human-written code, the leading UI software program Figma is training its AI on users’ files. Pretty soon, designers will be able to generate UIs via a prompt. And those generated UIs will be good enough because they’ll follow the patterns users are already familiar with. (Combined with an in-house design system, the feature will be even more useful.)

In one sense, this alleviates having to make yet another select input. Instead, opening up time for more strategic—and IMHO, more fun—challenges.

Three Minds

In today’s technology companies’ squad, aka Spotify model, every squad has a three-headed leadership team consisting of a product manager, a designer, and an engineering or tech lead. This cross-functional leadership team is a direct descendent of the copywriter-art director creative team pioneered by Bill Bernbach in 1960, sparking the so-called “creative revolution” in advertising.

Ads by DDB during the creative revolution of the 1960s. The firm paired copywriters and art directors to create ads centered on a single idea.

When I was at Organic in 2005, we debuted a mantra called, Three Minds.

Great advertising was often created in “pairs”—a copywriter and an art director. In the digital world, the creation process is more complex. Strategists, designers, information architects, media specialists, and technologists must come together to create great experiences. Quite simply, it takes ThreeMinds.

At its most simplistic, PMs own the why; designers, own the what; and engineers own the how. But the creative act is a lot messier than that and the lines aren’t as firm in practice.

The reality is there’s blurriness between each discipline’s area of responsibility. I asked my friend, Byrne Reese, Group Product Manager at RingCentral, about that fuzziness between PMs and designers, and here’s what he had to say:

I have a bias towards letting a PM drive product strategy. But a good product designer will have a strong point of view here, because they will also see the big picture alongside the PM. It is hard for them not to because for them to do their role well, they need to do competitive analysis, they need to talk to customers, they need to understand the market. Given that, they can’t help it but have a point of view on product strategy. 

Shawn Smith, a product management and UX consultant, sees product managers owning a bit more of everything, but ultimately reinforces the point that it’s messy:

Product managers cover some of the why (why x is a relevant problem at all, why it’s a priority, etc), often own the what (what’s the solution we plan to pursue), and engage with designers and engineers on the how (how the solution will be built and how it will ultimately manifest).

Rise of the Product Designer

In the last few years, companies have switched from hiring UX designers to hiring product designers.

The Google Trends data here isn’t conclusive, but you can see a slow decline for “UX design” starting in January 2023 and a steady incline for “product design” since 2021. In September 2024, “product design” overtook “UX design.” (The jump at the start of 2022 is due to a change in Google’s data collection system, so look at the relative comparison between the two lines.)

Zooming out, UX design and product design had been neck and neck. But once the zero interest-rate period (ZIRP) era hit and tech companies were flush with cash, there’s a jump in UX design. My theory is because companies could afford to have designers focus on their area of expertise—optimizing user interactions. At around March 2022, when ZIRP was coming to an end and the tech layoffs started, UX design declines while product design rises.

Looking at the jobs posted on LinkedIn at the moment, and you’ll find nearly 70% more product designer job postings than ones for UX designer—1,354 versus 802.

As Christoper K. Wong wrote so succinctly, product design is overtaking UX. Companies are demanding more from their designers.

Design Has Always Been About the Why

Steve Jobs famously once said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Through my schooling and early experiences in the field, I’ve always known this and practiced my craft this way. Being a product designer suits me. (Well, being a designer suits me too, but that’s another post.)

Product design requires us designers to consider more than just the interactions on the screen or the right flows. I wrote earlier that—at its most simplistic—designers own the what. But product designers must also consider why we’re building whatever we’re building.

This dual focus on why and what isn’t new to design. When Charles and Ray Eames created their famous Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman in 1956, they aimed to design a chair that would offer its user respite from the “strains of modern living.” Just a couple of years later, Dieter Rams at Braun, would debut his T3 pocket radio, sparking the transition of music being a group activity to a personal one. The Sony Walkman and Apple iPod are clear direct descendants.

The Eameses and Rams showed us what great designers have always known: our job isn’t just about the surface, or even about how something works. It’s about asking the right questions about why products should exist and how they might enrich people’s lives.

As AI reshapes our profession—just as CD-ROMs, websites, and mobile apps did before—this ability to think strategically about the why becomes even more critical. The tools and techniques will keep changing, just as they have since my days in San Francisco’s Multimedia Gulch in the 1990s. But our core mission stays the same: we’re still that translation layer, creating meaningful connections between businesses and their audiences. That’s what design has always been about, and that’s what it will continue to be.