The Future of Product Design
A view into the next age of digital
Well it's a wild time for any product designer. The job market is f**ked, too many players, everything looks bland, and AI is coming to snatch our cold dead careers out of our cold dead hands.
Well maybe not. But as Timothy Chalamet one sung “times they are a changin’”.
It’s important that you are prepared for these changes. So I’ve put together a list of the actionable stuff. Product stuck it in JIRA, and it’s in the craplog. Strap yourself in…
RIP Figma
Oh boy. Figma. Everyone and their mum are soothsaying the demise of the most common product design tool, Figma.
What started off as a brilliant alternative to the crazy, Dutch Mac-only app Sketch, the PolyFormat® Figma, love-bombed us all, like a toxic new partner. It did everything we wanted. The first few years, my goodness it was glorious, all you needed was a web browser and you could create endless rectangles, all saved in the cloud. Life was great.
Then something happened. Figma got greedy. It realised that design does not pay the bills, it needed more users. How could it get everyone to use it, and pay 15 bucks a month each for the privilege?
Seats. Yeah now this app is for the entire product design team. We can all use it, we can leave comments, and ‘dev mode’ means the developers can access it and do their own handoff (RIP Zeplin)
Now your humble art boards are the main resource for the project, 247 people are on it 24/7, and those unnamed layers are live, and visible to all of your team. A live window into your Imposter Syndrome.
And auto layout means ‘Rebekah from Marketing’ can ‘jump into Figma’ and tweak your rectangles.
NO REBEKAH. Leave my rectangles alone!. (ok wow, HR just emailed me about my tone)
Figma is now a hugely pricey ‘DesignOps’ software. It’s a production tool for a team to ‘collab’ to get the rectangles to work for Product and Dev. It’s also bloated with unnecessary features stolen from other SAAS products, like Miro. Now you can do a PPT/Canva slideshow design in Figma? Ok how about no?
And Figma never really got into what would be a designers best feature?…
Prototyping
Rapid prototyping has always been the money shot in product design. It’s also the de facto conduit between great craft, vision, and the built, shipped version which serves the public. It’s the perfect mid point between aspiration and realisation.
Figma never really went with this. There’s probably no money in it for them, and thats cool as there are now so many new tools to make more than a simple clickable prototype (RIP Invision).
Enter the low/no code ‘design’ software. It's just you, and your rectangles, but now they are interactive, and move around and you can make them behave like a proper product. You can use animations and live data. Theres no collaborative options, so you can make your magic in peace, and then send it out.
The good designers wont ditch Figma, but will spend the majority of their ‘making stuff’ time in ‘environments’ such as ProtoPie, Rive, Framer, Webflow and Play. You can now design and build quasi-production-grade prototypes in real time. Maybe the code isn’t fully reusable, but it feels ‘proper’.
Should designers code? YES.
But please understand boundaries, as ‘proper native’ developers are on a whole different level.
A prototype serves as a living interactive artefact and proud digital asset. It’s never going to be production ready code, but we are past clickable screens now, and design is more about experiences and ‘moments’. Just don’t use too much…
AI
Artificial Intelligence has always been an oxymoron. If it’s artificial, it’s fake, man-made, or synthetic. Intelligence requires consciousness, emotions, or creativity, which computers can’t even come close to understanding or replicating.
So why is AI going to take your design job?
It’s not.
Look, I’ve been doing this for 30 years now and anyone who says that AI is going to replace design, just has no idea what design or AI *actually* are
Product design is 10% ‘making stuff look nice’ and 90% human communication. It starts with a brief, and ends with a shippable product.
The last product I worked on was a flagship native app for a massive payments corporation. That team was 25 people minimum. They were all professional humans
It’s the same with people espousing the idea that AI is going to change the special effects and CGI industry. Anyone with the faintest idea of what a production pipeline is, knows that a computer can, at best, render some novelty concepts, help automate some administration, and simplify some processes. It will never make stuff that goes live. It cant work with humans.
AI can’t understand a proper design brief. It cant talk to humans and synthesise user research, and it will never be able to satiate the requirements of a full agile product team. It can’t understand the role of a scrum master (well who can, but I digress…), it can’t take part in a daily standup; and it cant do backlog grooming, sprint planning or understand tech debt. It’s just not ‘intelligent’ enough, in the basic sense, to be an integral part of a digital product team
AI will impact product design, but not in the way you think.
Currently an app or website has a bespoke layout, created by a human product designer, using components in a design system.
Soon there will be three types of digital product:
1) Voice & conversational UI
AI will mature to a point where the entry level of any digital product will be a greatly improved version of a chatbot. Most customers will interact with this service, for a day-to-day relationship with the brand and its products
2) The website/app
This is what we currently have, bespoke mobile-first layout and responsive breakpoints for web. Native apps using a fixed, human designed layout. This will be that companies main digital channel, designed by humans, for humans.
3) The new AI designer
Humans create a library of components, named and classified in a hierarchy. The next step of design system will be built for AI, not by AI.
An AI agent learns and appropriates these elements across an endless number of applications, at any screen size, for any and every user, bespoke to their needs and circumstances. 1000’s of versions, in real time.
AI is going to take care of scenarios 1 and 3, but the most value is in retaining the human to human design process.
Unfortunately AI has spawned some unusual new job titles, all of which are ridiculous:
Vibe designing/coding/Prompt Engineer
These ridiculous new Gen Z style terms have arisen for someone with seemingly zero talent, who uses AI to design their rectangles or write their code. Now anyone can call themselves a designer or designer or a developer. Of course they are.
Except they are as much a designer/developer as an NFT of the Mona Lisa is to the *actual* Mona Lisa. You didn’t make anything, or create anything, you made a simulacra that would make even Jean Baudrillard cry into his Cassoulet.
It’s just nonsense.
And I think this guy started it off. Damn you Andrej.
Interview process
From gruelling design tasks to the rise of the AI hiring manager, getting a design job is going to be like finding a five leaf clover.
PRODUCT DESIGN INTERVIEW 2028:
Stage 1) Screening call with ScreenChimpAI®
Stage 2) Initial conversation with HireManagerAI®
Stage 3) Interview with Product & Tech
Stage 4) Design task using FigmAI — 1–2 hours (5 days)
Stage 5) Vibe coding session with PromptMaster (new term for design leader)
Stage 6) Full psychometric evaluation using MentalistAI®
Stage 7) Full body scan for biometric cross referencing for unwanted anomalies (creativity, critical thinking, originality etc)
Stage 8) Design System whiteboarding session with the Head of Tokens
Stage 9) 1.5hr Argument with CEO, CMO and CAIO
Stage 10) £1000 a ticket meat raffle
Ok lets wrap this up
Product design was always going to go the way of any craft. The separate specialities were homogenised into a single role. Most of the hard work will be done by the machines, and a small army of User Experience artisans will create bespoke experiences for humans. Copywriting is dead, as is UX writing. Design systems fully automated. DesignOps dead in the water
In line with most post apocalyptic sci-fi projections, product designers will pivot to becoming farmers.
People will always need food.
