Predictions for product & UX designers in 2024

How to get ahead of changes in the design industry that are likely to happen in 2024.

As we step into 2024, we are faced with an increasingly fast-paced and changing industry as UX, product and digital designers.

The end of 2023 was marked with a shift towards new forms of entrepreneurship and progression paths for designers, the onslaught of new tools and updates to existing tools that challenge what it means to be a designer, and an overall sense of malaise and change about the industry we operate in.

However, we don’t have to be pessimistic about the future of design. There is a sense of rapid change, absolutely, but also a sense of breaching a new frontier and treading new ground. Of entering a world where more and more people can create great designs, and where the act of being a designer skews more and more towards bespoke, custom and interesting projects.

We only need to be aware of changes that have a high chance of happening in our industry, so we can better prepare for them.

And with that, my predictions list for product, UX and digital design in 2024…

1 — AI Tools will be released that expedite repetitive design tasks, in turn taking more market share from Junior designers, but improving the design output of non-designers

As AI begins to mature we are starting to see more and more tools that seek to aid designers in their day to day work.

The likes of ChatGPT broke new ground by making AI accessible to the masses but leaving the execution more or less in the hands of the user — they choose how to leverage the technology.

As we move into 2024 we’ll start to see more and more tools that focus on leveraging AI tech in specific packages designed to tackle specific problems for specific industries.

Things like design system generators, user persona creators, usability test idea generators, and much more.

These will start to package the technology into a format that takes the text-based output of engines like GPT, and apply a presentation layer and ‘product packaging’ presentation to them in a way that solves specific products for designers.

This also presents a unique opportunity for design-focused founders with experience in design to leverage AI technology to create these new tools and inevitably create the next generation of big design tools. Think about the likes of Zeplin, Sketch, and Figma in their early days.

The repercussions of this sea-change in the industry will in turn affect the supply of junior design jobs, in turn leading to some of the other predictions below, but also making it increasingly more and more difficult to get into the design industry for those just starting out, and in turn making it easier for entrepreneurial senior and lead level designers to leverage these new tools to build increasingly efficient and effective service businesses around them.

2 — The highest tier of designers must become the shepherds of low design maturity organisations through work, not words

At the highest tier of design, the senior, lead and principle designer level, we are seeing a couple of things that should lead to a change in mindset for senior level designers working at low design maturity organisations:

Based on these statistics either 2 things can happen:

Either designers continue to jump between positions until they eventually land at a high-maturity organisation. However, supply of these jobs is very limited in comparison based on an increasing number of layoffs, and this also assumes most designers would rather slot into an existing high-maturity design culture rather than help a company create one.

The advancement of technology, design tools, templated UI patterns, AI generated design work at a higher quality, and the increasing embedding of high-quality design patterns in new technology will all combine to have an overall lift on ALL organisations design maturity (even without them knowing). In turn, meaning that senior designers at these organisations will become more like shephards of good design, through their work and the tools they use, without needing to explicitly get ‘buy-in’ from the organisation to actively seek an improvement in design maturity (which is a difficult sell to any startup or small company because it means very little to them).

We also need to ask ourselves the question — if design maturity is high regardless of a organisation’s awareness of it, does it matter? If all organisations had a high design-maturity, would it be necessary for us to talk about design maturity at all? Or is the scale such that there will always be lower design maturity organisations

My belief through my experience, is that the majority of design work will always exist at the lower end of design maturity, whatever ‘level’ that is, and that it is the work of designers and the availability of the tools at our disposal that elevate design quality, help foster a strong design culture, and that ultimately helps improve organisations design maturity.

But also, as designers, we should be aware that ‘high design maturity’ is not always better or even necessary for an organisation to be successful. In these instances, we must become better as senior and lead designers, especially in a job market with less positions (due to layoffs), and more positions at low-maturity organisations, of identifying the opportunity to make meaningful change within an organisation, vs joining organisations that will always be stuck at the same level.

3 — The creative service subscription becomes established and branches out into other creative mediums

With the advent of courses targeted at ‘productising’ creative services, as well as the success of similar productised service offerings (including my own service — We Are Heroes), we are starting to see a widespread adoption of this business model as a viable alternative not only for individuals, but also for agencies who want to standardise their retainer offering.

Retainers have long been used in the agency space to maintain consistent relationships with clients, and for clients to essentially reserve both work and resource from an agency in order to keep their business moving, as well as the consistency of their creative output.

However, where previously this would have only been offered by agencies of multiple people to existing clients, we are now seeing, through the lens of ‘Micro-SaaS’, the offering being applied to freelance and solopreneur level businesses with success.

Most people are still learning a lot in this space though, with countless copycat services being offered that mirror or just downright steal other businesses offerings, leading to lots of low-performing businesses unsure of how to source leads, or even what type of work they want to offer or to whom.

What we will start to see this year is the refinement of these offerings, and the sink-or-swim success of those who have taken courses to apply this approach to their own business.

Creative subscription businesses will both become more specific at the solopreneur level, following specific service offerings with more niche industry targeting, but also become much more widespread in the agency arena. We’ll see multiple agencies begin to offer this option to clients right out of the gate, and market it as a standalone product, rather than just offering it to existing clients as a ‘retainer’.

4 — Designer layoffs continue

Unfortunately, designer layoffs will continue, leading to a prolonged spell over the next few years where organisations will be uncertain about investing in designers vs using templated/user-friendly tools themselves, as well as a shift in the nature of design work towards more bespoke, strategic, and specific work.

There are a few factors contributing to this:

Based on these factors, we can see organisations continuing to struggle to find designers who fit their needs, as well as designers struggling to maintain and learn all the skills required of them from smaller, lower-maturity organisations to find both employment but also enjoyment from that style of work.

5 — Designers find progression beyond senior/lead level in entrepreneurship

This predictions follow on from the prediction above.

Because of the increasing struggles of designers in smaller, lower design maturity organisations, as well as the lower investment in design in general, and the smaller amount of resources available to growing companies and startups, we’ll start to see a shift in the progression of senior and lead level designers happening outside of traditional employment.

What’s more, because we are also seeing the continued maturity of low and no-code business and product development tools, it is also easier than ever for designers to set up their own product or service businesses.

Designers will begin to build their own products, start their own businesses, launch their own service offerings, and their own training courses, as a way of progressing their skills, earnings, and careers, rather than progressing into ‘head of’ or ‘chief design officer’ roles, which will become increasingly less common (unless one of the founders was a designer).

6 — UX and Product design take a more holistic approach to problem-solving, moving away from a systems approach

When you’re in a high-design maturity organisation, processes and systems help rationalise the chaos, and apply tried-and-tested approaches to design work in order to streamline the work done by many people.

However, when designers begin to operate more individually or in small teams, and when we start to need to solve more and more bespoke problems, the established patterns and linear processes just don’t work any more.

Because of this, we’ll start to see a more holistic problem-solving approach adopted by individual designers and small teams, where a more modular approach is taken to tackling any given problem, that also caters for external inputs such as timeframe, budget, and other business requirements.

This requires designers to be more collaborative with organisations at a business level, but more individual and adaptive when it comes to arriving at design solutions.

We’ll start to see more organisations and teams adopting a more ‘pick-and-choose’ approach to problem-solving, where they choose the right exercises, workshops and techniques, based on the unique requirements of individual projects, features and clients, rather than forcing everyone into a double-diamond shaped box.

This should be seen as a positive change for the industry, meaning that solutions can become much more considered, strategic, bespoke, but also engender a lot more support from business functions that don’t necessarily need to or want to understand convoluted and outdated design processes.

7 — Idea generation begins to move from teams back to the individual, making the art of pitching/storytelling more important than collaboration

We’ve seen an increasing number of thought-pieces over the last few years that challenge the widely accepted notion that collaboration is the only way to make the best creative work.

This, combined with the new world of design employment, consisting of smaller teams, a more adaptive and flexible approach to problem-solving, and the continued high demand at low-maturity organisation for senior talent, means that we’ll be seeing a return to more of a ‘generate ideas individually, then pitch’ approach, versus collaborative idea generation done with larger teams of designers.

And even then, for larger teams, the increasing need to learn how to pitch and tell stories that sell the idea in a world of lower investment, designer layoffs and stretched organisational resources means that we, now more than ever, need to spend more time and work justifying and selling our ideas to others.

For existing designers and also those new coming into the field this presents an opportunity, where the soft skills of pitching and storytelling become much more valuable in both finding and seeking employment, but also in job satisfaction through getting more ideas actually built by organisations.

This also aligns with the trajectory of design becoming a more and more generalist field, whereby success comes through the willingness and application of a much broader range of design principles, and the pure specialists begin to struggle.

8 — Creative education moves away from rapid-fire bootcamps to a more long-term approach to learning

And last but not least on my list of predictions for 2024!

I believe that design education has no choice but to move away from the format of rapid-fire bootcamps and one-off courses that promise to land you a job after you complete the course, to being a much more long-term learning process (arguably this is already the case but marketing is just trying to convince us otherwise).

What this means for designers is that we can view learning new skills adjacent to our specialism as a more important factor in progressing our careers instead of diving too deep into our specialism.

We will also see a smaller number of people applying to and completing these courses, as the lure of easy high starting salaries + ease of learning becomes less and less for prospective designers. As mentioned above, we are already seeing the number of design jobs across all seniority levels reduce due to organisational pressures across the board.

I believe that we are on a path that leads UX, product and digital design down more of an ‘architecture’ style route, where the majority of work is completed using preset tools and templates that meet a high enough level of design quality, and where the actual training and work comes more into play with more bespoke projects and custom work that solve very specific and niche problems.

Key takeaways

So there you have it, my predictions for 2024 (and beyond) for the design industry and for designers.

I would encourage us as designers to approach these changes positively, and as always, adapt to the changing environment in order to thrive rather than lamenting the changes and digging a hole in the sand.

For me, the key takeaways moving forwards as a designer are:

Be open to AI tools and leverage them to improve your work, but also free up your time for other more interesting creative work
Be open to helping willing low-maturity organisations through good design decisions, new tools, and great storytelling
If you are looking to progress at the senior/lead level, explore opportunities outside traditional employment
Don’t take layoffs personally — this happened to me during the pandemic, and is happening to everybody
Be willing to take different paths to solutions that sit outside of rigid, linear and traditional processes
Embrace opportunities for idea generation and problem solving as an individual rather than relying on workshops or collaboration
View your design journey as a long-term one, and don’t rely on short-term online education or bootcamps to land you a job