Shopify just killed UX design
Carl Rivera believes that in the artificial intelligence era, we don't need the 'UX' in UX designer. Last week, Rivera, chief design officer at Shopify, dropped the title at the e-commerce company, along with the title of content designer.
His public announcement was met with some kudos and quite a bit of disagreement. 'When I put it out online, you get a complete view of how the market looks and feels about change,' he says. 'How our jobs and how work is changing in the AI era of technology is both extremely exciting, but it's also so frightening.'
For Rivera, dropping UX from job titles is about empowering humans in the face of AI. Instead of using his team to implement best UX practices, he's asking them to lean in to what makes their skills unique: taste and intuition. 'I want to get away from terms that make our craft more science than art. AI enables anyone to make things usable. Our job is to make them unforgettable,' Rivera said in his announcement.
Scientists and engineers codified 'user experience' as a discipline in the mid-'80s and '90s after the success of the graphical user interface ushered in by the Macintosh. Since then, UX has developed predictable and replicable best practices—many of which have been consumed and replicated by AI at this point. Rivera argues that UX, as a discipline, has become a bounded box created to standardize the experience of technology. UX designers use these rules and play within that safe zone 'because it feels good to quantify things,' he says.
But he believes those same rules also push other people in the organization away from the creative process. The result of the current system are user experiences that rate, according to Rivera, a '7 out of 10.' They tick all the boxes, but they are ultimately forgettable.
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