The UX Reckoning: Prepare for 2025 and Beyond

It’s a tough time to be a UX professional. Pessimism, disillusionment, and frustration are widespread. Whether you have a UX job or you’re looking for one, you’re probably familiar with the feeling. Predictions for the future of UX are rife with pessimism, with few suggestions for what we can do about it.

The bad news: a lot of the factors contributing to the current situation are outside of your control. The good news: UX has always been like this (more or less). And there are things you can do to improve your situation in 2025 and beyond.

UX on the Chopping Block

What’s Happening

The AI hype cycle has triggered a massive influx of investments into tech — hundreds of billions of US dollars in 2024 alone. But it doesn’t feel like we’re back where we were immediately post COVID, when companies competed to hire design talent. Instead, 2024 felt like a continuation of hard times, as raising interest rates cut down on the cheap cash flowing into tech. Tech giants began to cut staff, and design departments in many other industries followed. In 2023, UX job postings dropped roughly to 70% of their 2021 levels, according to Indeed.

There’s some data that suggests that the tech job market has been improving over the past year and might continue to grow. But for many people (and maybe for you, reader), it hasn’t felt that way.

There are plenty of talented, experienced design and research professionals who have been job hunting for months with no luck. Things have been tougher for new UXers — with so many experienced people on the market, it’s hard for them to compete. As a result, many who were hopeful to break into UX are now desperately pivoting into slightly different, more plentiful roles,  like product management.

We’ve been here before. When the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, it nearly took NN/g down. Back then, when budgets in companies were tight, research and design were the first to go — many business leaders considered them “nice-to-have” and not essential to business. Unfortunately, that attitude is clearly still very prevalent. We’re seeing a massive regression of the average UX maturity in organizations (and that average wasn’t very high to begin with).

What’s Next

As a response to UX’s continued presence on the corporate chopping block (and the undervaluation that puts it there), some UX teams are attempting a rebrand. They’re calling themselves “insights research,” “business innovation,” or “experience design.” There’s a renewed surge of interest in customer experience (CX).

The goal of these renaming efforts is to distance the UX work from the inaccurate perspective on UX that has plagued our field for decades (particularly the idea that UX “makes things pretty”) and has severely inhibited UX effectiveness.

A new name won’t fix anything. We’ve walked this route before, when we changed “usability” to “UX.” “Advocating for the user” and “evangelizing UX” have been our tactics. It’s time we consider different ones — and there are steps you can take as an individual to make a difference.

What You Can Do

Be Flexible and Resourceful

This field is ever changing, because it’s so intimately tied to the pace of technological development. Add AI into the mix, and things are getting even more complicated. Do not to cling too tightly to how you’ve done UX work, successfully communicated your value, or finetuned your craft in the past. We’re all about to have very different roles and titles in the next few years. Accept it, be open to it, and (even) pursue it.

Empathize with Other Disciplines

Are we the problem? Maybe.

UX pros (your authors included) tend to get very passionate about the human beings they design for. Sometimes, that translates into detectable frustration and irritation at other teams and stakeholders. In many cases, the common response is to double down on the rigor of our work, leading to the perception that UX is “difficult” or that it adds unnecessary time and costs to the process.

We’ve seen (and at times been responsible for) UX folks treating people in other roles like they’re stupid for not understanding or agreeing with a specific course of action. UX has a lot of jargon. It’s no wonder we often have trouble talking to other teams and stakeholders.

Strive to explain UX ideas in plain, relatable terms and focus on building relationships with stakeholders. We must be willing to adjust our ideal processes in an effort to meet in the middle and have a healthy collaboration.

Remember: Your Job Is to Achieve Business Goals, Too

UX professionals often love their work because they love helping people. In fact, 84% of UX pros in a recent survey said that creating an impact was the best thing about their jobs. What we don’t tend to love are business goals.

Whether we like it or not, we’re all employed for a reason. Yes, to make users happy, but to do that in a way that makes our employers successful. Even if you work for a nonprofit, you’ll still need to achieve that nonprofit’s goals. This type of pragmatism can feel disillusioning to newer UX professionals.

 Product, a field related and somewhat rival to UX, does not have the same problem. Product is intensely business-focused — to the extent that product managers sometimes sacrifice long-term user relationships for the sake of short-term metrics or financial gains, a practice that is anathema to UX. However, to survive, UX practitioners need to find a middle ground between user goals and business goals.

Recognize that There’s Only So Much You Can Do

We need to recognize that we’re individuals in a vast capitalist system. If you’re frustrated that your company’s culture is still stuck at maturity stage 1 after years of trying to improve, it isn’t all your fault. If you have to take a different job role than your ideal to pay the bills, that’s okay. As a community, we could do better supporting and understanding each other.

Post-Hype AI: Value and Agency

What’s Happening

Now, add AI on top of our wobbly Jenga tower of an industry.

2024 represented a bit of a reality check to both the exuberant AI advocates and the AI apocalypse doomsayers. While pockets of extreme positivity and extreme negativity will continue, we’re seeing the industry at large settle into a more realistic post-hype perspective. According to the UXPA, UX professionals who used AI to help with their work found it had “some value” (47%) or were “not impressed” (20%).

The field is starting to develop a better understanding of generative AI’s strengths and weaknesses. We’re recognizing that current models still struggle with factual accuracy, attention to detail, privacy, security, reliability, bias, and IP violation. The companies that rushed into poorly thought-out (or downright scammy) AI features and products have started to fail, providing a cautionary tale for the rest of us.

What’s Next

Towards the end of 2024, we started to see some vastly improved integrations of AI into UX tools. In particular, AI features integrated into design and research platforms (like Figma or Dovetail) have become much more useful since the spring of 2024. In 2025, expect this trend to continue. We’ll increasingly see AI powering our tools to accelerate and improve our work in reliable, responsible ways.

Why are these AI features becoming more useful now? Well, now that we’re moving past the frantic AI high, teams are slowing down to consider how AI can address user and organization needs — instead of just integrating AI for its own sake.

They’re also doing a better job of scoping AI features to take advantage of its strengths — for example, using generative AI to suggest preliminary data codes instead of attempting to complete the research-data analysis entirely without human input.

In addition to better-designed AI products, we’ll also see continued improvements in the LLMs that power them. In particular, we’re anticipating important developments in “small AI” (Small Language Models). We’ll see more integration of AI into devices (think Apple Intelligence), as well as more scoped, domain-specific models, which might be particularly useful for highly regulated and high-security environments. Model efficiency will be key as increased demand and application of AI will increase energy consumption.

We’ll see AI getting more involved in conducting user research, particularly in improving asynchronous studies. Now that it’s possible for AI systems to process and summarize video clips, we’re likely to see attempts at having AI analyze — or even conduct — usability studies. However, current systems are nowhere near being able to “watch” a behavioral research session like humans can and still struggle to provide deep insights.

In 2025, get ready to see AI agents everywhere — systems empowered to take action with less human oversight and input. For example, imagine that Siri doesn’t just return a list of hotels in Chicago, but can book a room for you.

What You Can Do

Get Into the Outcome-Oriented Mindset

Start thinking about outcome-oriented design now. This will represent a mental shift for many designers, where we’ll give up some degree of control to AI. That means we’ll need to specify constraints for the AI, and design systems will help with this task. Our philosophy and practice will remain the same, but our medium will shift. We’ll have work to do to build trust with users and catch AI-generated errors.

Keep Delivering Value for Your Users

Let’s move beyond the sparkles icon. AI for AI’s sake didn’t work, so let’s return to our core principles of building things that people actually want and need. That means pulling out our tried-and-true methods that are technology-agnostic, like discovery research and iterative design. Focus on addressing unmet user needs and explore where AI can uniquely enhance or simplify the experience — even if the solution isn’t flashy or groundbreaking.

Treat AI’s UX Outputs as a First Draft

When using generative AI (genAI) to help you with your work, don’t let it do all your thinking for you. Current genAI is like an intern — it requires oversight and verification. While it can be useful for exploring a new topic space or skill, you need to treat its output as a starting place. Modern LLMs can be factually incorrect (through hallucinations or bad training data) anywhere from 1-30% of the time (depending on the model and prompt.) If the stakes are high, it’s worthwhile to fact-check. If you can generate something (an idea, insight, or copy) using AI with little effort, so can your competitors.

Balance Between Informed and Overwhelmed

AI technology is moving quickly. It’s easy to feel like you’re being left behind. Don’t worry about keeping up with every new advancement. Sign up for some newsletters from sources you trust to keep you updated on how AI applies to your work specifically. (May we suggest the NN/g newsletter?)

Shallow UX Will Suffer

What’s Happening

UX is growing internationally. We see a surge in the adoption of UX practices, with new professionals entering the field from diverse regions and backgrounds.

Alongside this growth, the role of social media in UX has exploded. Influencer culture has made its way into UX via platforms like LinkedIn, where individuals build a reputation for themselves by sharing resources, tips, or personal anecdotes.

This trend has promoted a rat race of sharing (often without proper credit or context) for the sake of engagement. This lack of intellectual integrity contributes to a broader degradation of the field, replacing genuine innovation with superficial sharing aimed at visibility.

Without proper context, understanding, and application, any framework or idea is useless. Take design thinking,for example. When used in the right context, with the right audience, and with the appropriate expectations, design thinking has immense value. Unfortunately, as the framework grew in popularity over the past decade, it became distorted and misused. People made outlandish promises about how simply following the 6 steps of design thinking would change the world — so, of course, it didn’t deliver.

When you again consider the immense growth we’ve seen in the UX industry and the explosion of social media, it’s clear why this problem is growing. We’ve seen ample shallow, scammy content specifically aimed at newer professionals who may not have enough experience to critically approach what they encounter.

This environment has caused a proliferation of tools and templates. Every day, a new “ultimate UX checklist” or “complete design-system template” hits the market (or gets shared without proper attribution). While these can be helpful for efficiency and knowledge sharing, they also feed a culture where shortcuts replace the deep, critical thinking that is essential to meaningful UX work.

What’s Next

Automation and augmentation will continue to shape the future of UX work. Tools that streamline tedious design tasks and simplify the research process will become more advanced and accessible, freeing up practitioners to focus on higher-value, strategic work. While these technologies will improve efficiency, they will also automate basic, repeatable tasks and the bar for what makes a UX professional indispensable will rise.

Uniquely human abilities are the future of our field. Critical thinking, creativity, and taste — the ability to discern and curate a series of outputs and decisions — will become the differentiators. In a world where automation handles the grunt work, the survivors of the “UX reckoning” will be those who excel at the high-level thinking and decision making that machines can’t replicate.

Soft skills will reign supreme. The ability to build relationships, communicate effectively, facilitate a group, and navigate complex organizational dynamics will be as valuable as technical skills, if not more so.

What You Can Do

Go Beyond Templates and Think for Yourself

Templates, checklists, and tools can be helpful, but they’re not a substitute for thoughtful reflection or a unique point of view. If you’re spending more time downloading other people’s frameworks than deeply understanding your users and their needs, it’s time to recalibrate.

UX is messy. It can’t be placed neatly in boxes or approached in the same exact way every time. Those who thrive in this industry love that aspect of it. It’s great to use templates and frameworks as a starting point. But think carefully about the nuances of the specific situation you’re in, your goals, and your toolkit.

Embrace Becoming the Unicorn

Get comfortable wearing many hats and focus on developing a broad understanding across UX disciplines. Many principles in our field will remain the same, but the mediums and tangible outputs from our work will evolve significantly as AI advances.

While there are exceptions, the industry as a whole has been overly attached to outputs — the tangible things we create —  rather than to the deeper purpose driving them (outcomes). By shifting focus to the core mission of designing technology that everyone can use and enjoy, we can maintain relevance and adaptability. This shift in mindset will also help you navigate the increasing fluidity of UX roles as AI reshapes tasks and responsibilities within the field.

Expand Your Understanding of Adjacent Fields

As the boundaries between UX and other disciplines blur, gaining knowledge in adjacent fields like systems thinking, data modeling, business strategy, or product management will set you apart. This broader understanding will prepare you for emerging roles that combine multiple disciplines.

References

Brookshier, K. UX Job Listings Plunged in 2023. Indeed Design. August 2023. https://indeed.design/article/ux-job-listings-plunged-in-2023/.

CompTIA. State of the Tech Workforce 2024. March 2024. https://www.comptia.org/content/research/state-of-the-tech-workforce.

McKay, C. NVIDIA’s New AI Blueprint Makes it Easy to Search and Summarize Video. Maginative. November 4, 2024. https://www.maginative.com/article/nvidias-new-ai-blueprint-makes-it-easy-to-search-and-summarize-video/.

Teixeira, F. and Braga, C. “UX Trends.” UX Collective. https://trends.uxdesign.cc

UXPA International. 2024 UX Salary Survey. November 2024. https://uxpa.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2024/11/UXPA_SalarySurvey_2024_v1.pdf.