UX Skills for Business Strategy

Epilogue

The world doesn’t just happen to us. We make it.

—Lesley-Ann Noel, Dean of the Faculty of Design, Ontario College of Art and Design*

There is power and agency in making things. Some organizations would like us to believe that creation can be reduced to the making of artifacts that can be commoditized and streamlined through AI, but we remember that those things aren’t interchangeable.

In the process of building an experience, we make a series of decisions that are context specific. We weigh a multitude of elements including the business, the market, the people we design for, our partners, constraints, and priorities. Navigating this process is inherently and entirely human, requiring human relationships, embodiment, ambitions, and pressures. AI-based tools can augment, support, and accelerate what we do, but these UX skills can’t be mastered by an LLM or agent and merely applied.

This book’s mission is to reframe the conversation. Instead of debating whether AI can do design as well, better or faster than humans, we should ask what skills are well suited for the context and desired impact. While there’s mounting fear in the UX community that we and all of our skills are becoming irrelevant or replaceable, we strongly disagree.

Our beloved UX community has focused on problems, process, and craft, but our skills tend to be misunderstood. We’ve made an effort to detail not only what those UX skills are, but also the business elements that make context complex. Everything ...