The year is 2025 and UX design is falling apart. More and more companies are adopting AI-powered tools to build products, and the methods and processes that used to take months now happen in a couple of weeks—if not days when it comes to desktop research. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the value of the work traditional UX designers do has depreciated. I’m saying how we add value and the traditional UX design process needs to be completely re-imagined for 2025 and beyond.
This is something that’s been eating at me since most UX designer patterns got templatized in design systems and UI kits. For most use cases, a “UX designer” could typically select a design system, icon set, and design kit to rapidly design and spin up a prototype. Most designers use this approach to save time and start from a standard baseline. It works, but it’s also commoditizing the craft.
With how AI is advancing today, UX designers find themselves in more and more of this predicament. As companies lay off digital design and engineering roles left and right, the value of the UX designer is being questioned daily when you can prompt a vibe coding tool to build something from a design you’ve created using custom or boilerplate templates to build the experience you’re looking for. The tools are getting scary good, scary fast.
Why I Never Saw UX Design as Just “Design”
I have never thought of the UX Designer role as a design role, really. I’ve always thought of it as a problem-solving role and as the glue that brings the product together. That’s why I prefer terms like product builder, product manager, or product owner. This takes the “Designer” box out of the way for people to understand the work traditional UX designers actually do. The word “Designer” is not only misleading to people who don’t know what UX designers do, but it’s also a massive under-description of what UX designers actually accomplish.
The role of the UX designer is to understand the user problem and solve for it, improve based on user feedback, and understand what makes the product a hero in the user’s hands. These are incredibly valuable qualities, and when applied correctly, we see significant impact in how better UX makes products stand out and helps businesses answer the right user needs and problems. However, the real issue here is the approach—adapting old-school UX methodologies to the world we’re living in today.
I’m a fan of remixing methodologies and processes like the design sprint or the double diamond design process to make them fit the situation, project, or team I’m working with at the moment. There’s no one-size-fits-all according to my experience over the past 15 years of building digital products. But even with remixing, we’re still working with fundamentally outdated frameworks.
Our 20-Year-Old Methodologies Can’t Keep Up
The design world has been clinging to methodologies that feel increasingly antiquated in 2025. The Double Diamond, born in 2005’s broadband era, assumes we have the luxury of linear discovery phases. Design Sprints, conceived during Google’s 2010 startup culture, presuppose that five days of intensive workshops can solve complex problems. User personas, dating back to the dial-up 1990s, reduce dynamic human behavior to static demographic snapshots.
These frameworks emerged when software updates took months, user research required focus groups, and AI was science fiction. Today’s reality demands something radically different.
Our methodologies can’t keep pace with AI-powered personalization that adapts in real-time, or users whose digital behaviors shift with each algorithm update. The Double Diamond’s structured divergence and convergence feels bureaucratic when machine learning can generate and test hundreds of design variations overnight. Design Sprints lock teams into rooms for a week while continuous deployment cycles could have shipped, tested, and iterated three times over.
Most problematically, our persona-driven approach treats users as predictable archetypes when behavioral data shows us that the same person exhibits completely different patterns across contexts, devices, and even times of day. We’re designing for fictional characters while real users defy categorization in ways that would make our carefully crafted personas completely useless.
The methodologies that served us well in the iPhone’s infancy weren’t built for ambient computing, conversational interfaces, or ethical AI considerations. They don’t account for designing across augmented reality layers, managing user consent in real-time, or creating inclusive experiences for neurodivergent users who interact with technology in ways our personas never anticipated.
We need frameworks that embrace uncertainty rather than trying to eliminate it, that design for dynamic personalization rather than one-size-fits-all solutions, and that integrate ethical considerations from the ground up rather than as an afterthought.
The question isn’t whether these methodologies served their purpose—they absolutely did. The question is whether holding onto them is preventing us from solving the complex, interconnected challenges that define design in 2025.
Companies Are Already Expecting This Expanded Role
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to talk about—companies are already pushing UX designers into these expanded roles, whether we acknowledge it or not. Job descriptions that say “UX Designer” now expect you to:
- Define product requirements and roadmaps (that’s product strategy)
- Write microcopy, error messages, and marketing copy (that’s content strategy)
- Design and optimize conversion funnels (that’s growth marketing)
- Analyze user behavior data and present insights to executives (that’s data analysis)
- Manage cross-functional teams and timelines (that’s project management)
- Understand technical constraints and sometimes implement designs in code (that’s technical skills)
- Directly interface with customers and analyze support tickets (that’s customer success)
The title might still say “UX Designer,” but companies are hiring Product Experience Owners who happen to have design skills. Design skills are now the foundation, not the entirety, of the role.
This isn’t happening because companies want to overwork designers—it’s economic reality. They need versatile professionals who can own the complete user experience, not specialists who hand off work at artificial boundaries that don’t exist in the user’s mind anyway.
What the Modern Design Process Should Actually Look Like
Here’s what I think the modern design process should actually look like—something I’ve been refining based on real-world product launches and market realities, not conference talks and case studies.
Problem + Market Validation
Forget the discovery phase that takes months. Dive straight into user behavior data and identify real friction points. Run quick user interviews to validate or kill hypotheses fast. But here’s the key difference—simultaneously research how users discover solutions to this problem. What channels do they use? What language do they search with? This isn’t just user research, it’s market intelligence.
You’re not just understanding the problem; you’re understanding the entire ecosystem around the problem. How do people currently solve this? What alternatives exist? What’s the competitive landscape? What are the switching costs? This gives you a complete picture that traditional discovery phases miss entirely.
Solution + Story Prototyping
Rapidly prototype multiple interface variations, but you’re not just designing the product—you’re designing the entire user journey from awareness to advocacy. How will they first hear about this solution? What’s the onboarding story? How does this fit into their existing workflow and life? Create live prototypes that include the discovery and marketing touchpoints, not just the product interface.
This is where most UX designers stop, but this is where the real work begins. You’re prototyping not just the solution, but the story of how someone moves from having a problem to becoming an advocate for your solution. That includes every touchpoint, every communication, every moment of friction or delight.
Build + Launch Integration
Deploy with feature flags while simultaneously building launch campaigns. The person who designed the user experience should be involved in how users discover it. You understand the value props better than anyone—you should be writing the landing page copy, designing the email sequences, mapping the social media strategy. This isn’t separate from UX work, it’s the complete user experience.
Most UX designers hand off their designs and consider the job done. But the user experience starts long before someone opens your app and continues long after they close it. You designed the solution—now design how people find it, try it, adopt it, and tell others about it.
Experience Optimization
Real-time user behavior informs immediate iterations across the entire funnel—not just the product. Are people dropping off at the landing page? Is the onboarding confusing? Are users not finding features? Are they churning after the first week? The entire experience gets optimized as one system.
This isn’t A/B testing button colors. This is understanding human behavior across the complete experience and making systematic improvements that compound over time.
Expanding Into Complete Brand Experience Design
This is where I think we need to stop fighting this expansion and start embracing it strategically. You’re not designing screens—you’re designing how humans discover, try, adopt, and advocate for solutions. That means:
Discovery Design: How do users find out about your solution? What search terms, social posts, recommendations, or content marketing draws them in? You should be designing these touchpoints with the same rigor you design product interfaces.
Trial Design: What’s their first 5 minutes, first day, first week experience? This includes marketing emails, onboarding flows, feature discovery, and early value realization. Every moment matters.
Adoption Design: How does this solution integrate into their workflow and life? What are the behavioral changes required? How do you design for habit formation? This is behavioral psychology applied to product strategy.
Advocacy Design: How do satisfied users naturally share and recommend your solution? What makes it worth talking about? What gives them social capital for sharing it? This isn’t growth hacking—this is designing experiences so good people can’t help but talk about them.
The traditional UX designer focused on task completion. The modern product experience designer focuses on human behavior change across the entire relationship with your brand. We’re not just making things usable—we’re making them discoverable, adoptable, and memorable.
Modern tools and data analytics handle the heavy lifting of pattern recognition and user behavior analysis. Your job becomes directing that intelligence toward creating complete human experiences that actually succeed in the market, not just in usability tests. Because what’s the point of a perfectly designed product that no one discovers, tries, or remembers?
This approach gets products to market faster because you’re designing the entire go-to-market strategy alongside the product itself. No handoffs to marketing teams who don’t understand the user insights. No separate launch strategies built by people who weren’t involved in the solution design. It’s all one integrated experience, designed by the person who best understands what users actually need and how they actually behave.
The reality is that users don’t experience your product in isolation—they experience it as part of their entire digital ecosystem, their workflow, their life. If we’re going to call ourselves user experience designers, we need to design for the complete user experience, not just the part that happens inside our app.
This shift requires completely new methodologies, frameworks, and team structures that most organizations aren’t prepared for. I’m currently developing a comprehensive guide that details the specific processes, tools, and organizational changes needed for modern product teams to implement this integrated approach successfully. It will include practical frameworks, real case studies, and step-by-step implementation strategies for teams ready to make this evolution. Stay tuned for a resource that will fundamentally change how you think about and practice product experience design.