Business: UX Skills

With artificial intelligence (AI) transforming the professions that User Experience comprises, UX designers are facing both significant opportunities and perplexing challenges. The future of UX design—and most UX designers’ careers—makes AI skills and tool mastery imperatives that can amplify our potential and impact.

The need to adopt new toolkits is not new. Throughout the years, UX designers have always had to learn new tools to help them capture, create, and communicate their ideas. But this AI shift is distinct because our tools have now become creators that generate images, mockups, audits, and prototypes in just moments through the activation of just a simple prompt. This new reality is phenomenal to witness.

But, if you are like me and use AI regularly, you may have moments when the sheer power and speed of creation raises questions about authenticity—who is the creator?—and UX designer’s core skills. Are we, as UX designers, strengthening our core talents or letting them wither? In this column, I’ll discuss how to keep your UX design muscles sharp when the machine is doing the heavy lifting. Read More

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss what skills are essential and desirable for a UX Designer.

Each month in Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts answers our readers’ questions about a broad range of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your question to us at: [email protected].

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I still remember the frustration that I felt six months ago. I’d spent years designing internal systems for hospitals, tools to streamline workflows, help clinicians manage patient requests, and reduce friction for front-line users. But when I started job-hunting, every opportunity was another healthcare UX role: designing electronic health records (EHR) systems, hospital portals, or staff-facing dashboards. Once a badge of domain expertise, healthcare UX designer had suddenly become a label that kept me confined.

While I joined a company in industry A right out of school because I had no choice, I now want to explore industry B. But many companies want only people with domain expertise.

I hear this sentiment again and again from UX designers at all levels. In UX and product design, many of us began our career believing that our first industry domain would become the main industry in which we would work. What starts as an entry-level decision gradually becomes a limiting belief: If I’ve worked only in healthcare, I must stay in healthcare. If my background is in Fintech, that’s where I belong. Read More