Latest news with #CarlRivera
Fast Company
39 minutes ago
- Business
- Fast Company
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. The final deadline for Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech Awards is Friday, June 20, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
Fast Company
30-05-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Shopify's user experience will soon ‘feel like sci-fi'
'Imagine an interface where you can quickly shift between talking, typing, clicking, and even drawing to instruct software, like moving around a whiteboard in a dynamic conversation,' Carl Rivera tells me. An experience in which users are not presented with a barrage of nested menus, but with a blank canvas that invites creativity aided by an artificial intelligence that knows everything there is to know about online and brick-and-mortar retail and marketing. A fluid interface that adapts and anticipates your needs, automating tasks and recommending actions like the most brilliant partner you could dream of. That's a dream in itself, but it isn't a fantasy; it's Rivera's future vision for Shopify. Rivera is the company's new Chief Design Officer and he believes that, in the very near future, the e-commerce platform's user experience is going to feel like sci-fi. Rivera joined Shopify through the 2018 acquisition of his startup TicTail. Right after that, he was key to launching Shop, the company's consumer-facing business. His new position directly responds to industry skepticism about design's relevance in an AI-driven landscape. In this time in which everyone is shifting to AI but almost nobody has a clear idea why, it makes sense that Shopify's founder Tobi Lutke thought he needed someone like Rivera helming that leading position. 'We're entering a new technological paradigm with AI,' Rivera says, emphasizing that now, more than ever, it is strategic for Shopify to have a clear design vision about how to implement artificial intelligence in a truly empowering way for every company, from small retail shops to corporate giants. The company wants to reimagine its user experience, transforming it into a powerful tool for designers and business people that is easier to use and saves more time than ever before. 'Half of the people are talking about design being dead because the programs can design for you,' he says. 'We take quite the opposite point of view at Shopify.' The final deadline for Fast Company's Brands That Matter Awards is this Friday, May 30, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
