Column: Enterprise UX

Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally changing what UX designers design. For decades, UX design practice has centered on shaping user interfaces, focusing on workflows, layouts, interaction models, and information architectures. However, as generative AI is now beginning to produce wireframes, mockups, content, and even working code, the center of gravity of UX design work is shifting.

But take heart—this shift does not spell doom for the UX design profession. If anything, AI’s emergence is opening new avenues of creativity, reinforcing the underlying purpose of UX designers: We help organizations make better decisions about how technology should serve human needs. While this isn’t a new idea, AI is pushing this intent into frontiers that we’ve never explored before. In this column, I’ll explore these new frontiers, focusing on the following:

• shifting from user-interface design to designing decision-making
• defining the judgment layer
• manufacturing purposeful friction
• designing for probabilistic systems
• planning for composition in an era of interoperable systems
• ensuring AI decision-making remains visible
• reframing UX design as governance Read More

In my previous column, Designing the Judgment Layer: How UX Governs AI Autonomy,” I briefly explored the need to plan for composition in an era of open, interoperable systems. A pattern is emerging: UX designers can no longer assume a fixed application boundary or a fully knowable set of user journeys. As artificial intelligence (AI) systems, application programming interfaces (APIs), data services, and enterprise workflows become more interconnected, designers must focus less on controlling the whole experience and more on shaping the conditions under which we can safely compose experiences.

We’re moving from an application-centric view of software toward an ecosystem-centric one. In this new environment, a user’s experience might not begin and end within the product the user owns. Instead, the user experience might be constructed across products after being triggered by an AI agent, be embedded within another system, or be experienced through a user interface that we did not design. In this column, I’ll explore the following topics:

• moving beyond the application as the center of gravity
• designing conditions, not just journeys
• anticipating AI as the orchestrator
• avoiding composable confusion
• shifting UX upstream
• establishing a composable UX framework
• reshaping product strategy Read More

Has a developer or stakeholder ever informed you that your user-interface (UI) design deliverables were oversimplifying things or were portraying systems and workflows differently from the way they actually worked at a programmatic level? Perhaps they criticized you for creating order on top of the chaotic underpinnings of the systems or for willfully streamlining technical tasks whose completion they assumed to be the responsibility of users—who might not readily understand them. I’ve encountered such scenarios numerous times throughout my career. Often, the people offering such criticisms were correct: the user interfaces I had designed did not truly reflect the underlying system they represented. Of course, this was intentional on my part.

Human beings are hardwired to respond to stories—not complex systems. As I described in my column “Telling a Story Through Your UX Portfolio,” by building narrative into your portfolio, you can make a more resounding impact on interview teams than simply by reciting facts. Similarly, the people who use the user interfaces we design can better comprehend the workflows, interactive cues, and calls to action (CTAs) of those interfaces when we build narrative into them. Moreover, you can deliberately create narrative, which is beneficial to the people who use software systems because their perceptions of the systems often do not reflect the way the systems work. Read More