It’s been a bad, horrible, rotten year for UX. With waves of designers laid off, UX’s influence diminished, and uncertainty about the role of advanced technology, the design community is left to some serious soul-searching. We are undoubtedly embarking on major changes to our role in making digital products. Understanding the driving factors behind these changes is key in helping us prepare for what UX might look like in the near future.

The past two decades have seen amazing advances in visual interfaces. In 2007, the first iPhone emerged and began the era of personal digital displays and applications. Now, almost twenty years later, we live in a world saturated by visual user interfaces. In this period of time, the profession of UX has emerged as an important contributor and provided a pretty nice career for many designers. However, emerging technology is driving a shift that will fundamentally impact what UX does.

For several years, major technology companies have been trying to push beyond the tired app-centric visual interfaces that have defined the past era. Virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant have had varying degrees of success, though adoption is driven more by their distribution network than actual use of the features. A struggle has always been their limited ability to understand and act on the user’s behalf.

The emergence of natural language processing now looks poised to put the verbal interface into the driver’s seat. Combine that with product vision like the Rabbit R1 with its proposed large action model seeking to bridge the connectivity issue between apps, and the future begins to look very different for the role of UX. It is no coincidence that OpenAI has joined forces with Jony Ive to create the iPhone of AI. In the future, the user’s experience will not be through a solely visual interface. It will be through speech, chat, virtual/augmented reality, and visual possibly…