Four months into his role as interim CEO, Tom Conrad has been remarkably candid about Sonos’ catastrophic app launch. In recent interviews with WIRED and The Verge, he’s taken personal responsibility—even though he wasn’t at the helm, just on the board—acknowledged deep organizational problems, and outlined the company’s path forward.
But while Conrad is addressing more than many expected, some key details remain off-limits.
If users don’t trust the systems we design, that’s not a PM problem. It’s a design failure. And if we don’t fix it, someone else will, probably with worse instincts, fewer ethics, and a much louder bullhorn.
UX is supposed to be the human layer of technology. It’s also supposed to be the place where strategy and empathy actually talk to each other. If we can’t reclaim that space, can’t build products people understand, trust, and want to return to, then what exactly are we doing here?
It is a long read but well worth it.
We didn’t just lose our influence. We gave it away. UX professionals need to stop accepting silence, reclaim our seat at the table, and…
uxdesign.ccSarah Gibbons and Evan Sunwall from NN/g:
The rise of AI tools doesn’t mean becoming a “unicorn” who can do everything perfectly. Specialization will remain valuable in our field: there will still be dedicated researchers, content strategists, and designers.
However, AI is broadening the scope of what any individual can accomplish, regardless of their specific expertise.
What we’re seeing isn’t the elimination of specialization but rather an increased value placed on expanding the top of a professional’s “expertise T.”
This reinforces what I talked about in a previous essay, “T-shaped skills [will become] increasingly valuable—depth in one area with breadth across others.”
They go on to say:
We believe these broad skills will coalesce into experience designer and architect roles: people who direct AI-supported design tasks to craft experiences for humans and AI agents alike, while ensuring that the resulting work reflects well-researched, strategic thinking.
In other words, curation of the work that AI does.
They also make the point that designers need to be strategic, i.e., focus on the why:
This evolution means that the unique value we bring as UX professionals is shifting decidedly toward strategic thinking and leadership. While AI can execute tasks, it cannot independently understand the complex human and organizational contexts in which our work exists.
Finally, Gibbons and Sunwall end with some solid advice:
To adapt to this shift toward generalist skills, UX professionals should focus on 4 key areas: • Developing a learning mindset • Becoming fluent in AI collaboration • Focusing on transferable skills • Expanding into adjacent fields
I appreciate the learning mindset bit, since that’s how I’m wired. I also believe that collaborating with AI is the way to go, rather than seeing it as a replacement or a threat.
AI advances make UX generalists valuable, reversing the trend toward specialization. Understanding multiple disciplines is increasingly important.
nngroup.comSuch a gorgeous visual essay from Amelia Wattenberger. Beyond being wonderful to look at, the content is just as thought-provoking. Her experiment towards the middle of the piece is interesting. In our world of flat design and design systems, Amelia is truly innovating.
With increasing amounts of AI chatbots, we're losing even more: texture, color, shape. Instead of interactive controls, we have a text input. Want to edit an image? Type a command. Adjust a setting? Type into a text box. Learn something? Read another block of text.
wattenberger.com
In a recent podcast with partners at startup incubator Y Combinator, Jared Friedman, citing statistics from a survey with their current batch of founders says, “[The] crazy thing is one quarter of the founders said that more than 95% of their code base was AI generated, which is like an insane statistic. And it’s not like we funded a bunch of non-technical founders. Like every one of these people is highly tactical, completely capable of building their own product from scratch a year ago…”
A comment they shared from founder Leo Paz reads, “I think the role of Software Engineer will transition to Product Engineer. Human taste is now more important than ever as codegen tools make everyone a 10x engineer.”
The fall of Sonos isn’t as simple as a botched app redesign. Instead, it is the cumulative result of poor strategy, hubris, and forgetting the company’s core value proposition. To recap, Sonos rolled out a new mobile app in May 2024, promising “an unprecedented streaming experience.” Instead, it was a severely handicapped app, missing core features and broke users’ systems. By January 2025, that failed launch wiped nearly $500 million from the company’s market value and cost CEO Patrick Spence his job.
What happened? Why did Sonos go backwards on accessibility? Why did the company remove features like sleep timers and queue management? Immediately after the rollout, the backlash began to snowball into a major crisis.
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.
I recently read a post on Threads in which Stephen Beck wonders why the New York Times needs an external advertising agency when it already has an award-winning agency in-house. You can read the back-and-forth in the thread itself, but I think Nina Alter’s reply sums it up best:
Creatives need to be free to bring new perspectives. Drink other kool-aid. That’s much of the value in agencies.
This all got me thinking about the differences between working in-house and at an agency. As a designer who began my career bouncing from agency to agency before settling in-house, I’ve seen both sides of this debate firsthand. Many of my designer friends have had similar paths. So, I’ll speak from that perspective. It’s biased and probably a little outdated since I haven’t worked at an agency since 2020, and that was one that I owned.
I’ve always been a maker at heart—someone who loves to bring ideas to life. When AI exploded, I saw a chance to create something new and meaningful for solo designers. But making Griffin AI was only half the battle…
About a year ago, a few months after GPT-4 was released and took the world by storm, I worked on several AI features at Convex. One was a straightforward email drafting feature but with a twist. We incorporated details we knew about the sender—such as their role and offering—and the email recipient, as well as their role plus info about their company’s industry. To accomplish this, I combined some prompt engineering and data from our data providers, shaping the responses we got from GPT-4.
Playing with this new technology was incredibly fun and eye-opening. And that gave me an idea. Foundational large language models (LLMs) aren’t great yet for factual data retrieval and analysis. But they’re pretty decent at creativity. No, GPT, Claude, or Gemini couldn’t write an Oscar-winning screenplay or win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, but it’s not bad for starter ideas that are good enough for specific use cases. Hold that thought.
The design blog that connects the dots others miss. Written by Roger Wong.
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