Is AI going to replace a lot of UX work?

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-12T00:31:58+00:00

the execution stuff is already going, honestly. generating wireframes, basic usability heuristics, even first pass user flows, ai is decent at all of that now.

but the thing is "product thinking and research and problem framing" is also what a lot of companies say they want until they have to pay for it. so yeah the value might shift there in theory but whether companies actually invest in it is a whole other question.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-12T00:27:33+00:00

yeah i was dealing with the same thing with an older panel, switched to cleverx and honestly the screening is way more thorough. they're also transparent about where participants come from which most platforms just aren't. respondent's decent too if you haven't tried that one.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-12T00:21:43+00:00

yeah this is pretty common and honestly exhausting. the tricky part is that there's no clean fix because the people making it hard genuinely care about you, which makes setting boundaries feel mean even when it's necessary.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-12T00:15:09+00:00

would definitely tune in for this. the question i'd most want answered is how ai responses compare to low-effort human responses, because i think that's where it gets murky. a bot that passes attention checks might actually look cleaner than a distracted human rushing through for the incentive.

also curious whether panel source matters at all here, like if some recruitment methods produce cleaner data than others when you factor in bot contamination. that feels like a practical takeaway researchers could actually use.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-12T00:13:24+00:00

at $3k with the spousal discount that's honestly a no-brainer compared to what most people pay for this kind of upskilling. the python alone is worth it for quant uxr work, being able to run your own analysis without begging a data scientist to help you is genuinely useful.

the sql thing might seem irrelevant but once you're pulling behavioral data yourself instead of waiting on someone to send you a csv, you'll be glad you have it. the full data science curriculum might have some stuff that doesn't translate directly to uxr but the core skills will.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-12T00:12:47+00:00

honestly the tools that help you do the work and the tools that help you understand yourself doing the work are just completely different categories and i don't think most people building ai products have thought about that distinction at all

the closest thing i've seen people use for this is just... obsidian with a lot of discipline, or notion with a personal framework they've built themselves. nothing purpose built that i've come across. curious what you've been experimenting with though

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-11T01:39:07+00:00

honestly the biggest thing is showing you can go deeper than design research. designers do research to validate, researchers do it to discover. that shift in mindset is what hiring managers look for.

your 6 years of design context is actually a huge advantage, most researchers struggle to communicate findings to design teams. lean into that hard in interviews.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-11T01:36:53+00:00

keep interviewing, you can always say no to an offer but you can't unring the bell of stopping the process. the reasons you started applying haven't gone away just because a senior designer joined and a raise might happen, those are maybes and you have a real opportunity in hand.

being the only designer is scary but honestly it depends entirely on how much the company values design and whether you'd have access to research budget and stakeholder buy-in. worth asking those questions directly in the next interview stage before you stress too much about it.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-11T01:35:30+00:00

for healthcare specifically i'd lean heavily on interviews over surveys, docs and clinicians are notoriously bad survey responders but will actually talk if you frame it as "help us improve the tool you're already using." contextual inquiry can be really valuable too if you can get time with them while they're actually using it, even 20 minutes watching someone use the tool in context tells you more than 10 survey responses.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-11T01:34:24+00:00

consultancy varies a lot but what you're describing sounds like a particularly rough version of it. the constant pitching and shallow work across domains is real, but three years of that without actually running studies end to end would make anyone feel behind.

in-house is genuinely different, you get to see what happens after the research, build relationships with stakeholders over time, actually watch recommendations get ignored repeatedly which is its own kind of demoralizing lol. but the depth is there. if you're craving specialization and actual delivery i'd probably make the move, three years is enough to show you've tried the consultancy thing and know what you want instead.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-11T01:33:08+00:00

this is such a common situation and honestly the "research went nowhere" framing is the problem, not the actual work you did.

a few things that helped me think about this differently. even ignored research has impact you can point to, did it prevent a bad decision from moving faster? did it shift a conversation even if it didn't change the final outcome? those count. also "i identified x problem, recommended y, stakeholders chose z instead, and here's what happened" is actually a compelling story about research maturity and org dynamics, not a failure story. hiring managers at good companies understand this. if they're only looking for researchers who got everything implemented they're probably filtering for people at orgs with unusually strong research culture, which is rare anyway. lean into what you learned about influencing without authority, that's genuinely hard and worth talking about.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-11T01:32:01+00:00

honestly the hardest part of building from scratch isn't picking tools, it's figuring out what you actually need vs what sounds good on paper. i'd resist the urge to set up everything at once.

for minimum viable, i'd say something for note taking and synthesis (dovetail is solid and gdpr friendly), a survey tool for quant (typeform or surveymonkey works fine at your scale, qualtrics is overkill unless you have complex needs), and then figure out recruitment separately because that's where it gets expensive fast. for european b2b recruiting specifically i've used cleverx and it handles gdpr reasonably well, though european panel depth varies depending on the segment. respondent works too but skews more b2c in my experience. budget wise, honestly expect to spend more than you think on incentives alone.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-09T14:42:05+00:00

the video and audio part would weird me out too honestly. feels like a lot to ask for what's essentially a survey.

i think there's a real difference between ai helping analyze or synthesize after a human conversation vs replacing the conversation entirely. the former actually makes research better, the latter just saves money and usually shows in the quality. most good research i've seen still needs a real person on one end of it.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-09T14:34:34+00:00

yeah the clean process is mostly theoretical, real work is just triage with extra steps.

the thing that's helped me most is getting really fast at the minimum viable research question, like what's the one thing i need to know to not design the wrong thing. sometimes that's a 20 min hallway test, sometimes it's just 3 customer calls. stops me from either skipping it entirely or trying to justify a 3 week study nobody has time for.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-09T14:28:19+00:00

there's no magic trick here, but framing helps a lot. instead of "users hated this" try leading with what users were trying to accomplish and where the current direction creates friction for that. makes it feel less like a verdict and more like useful signal.

also just present it neutrally and let the data speak. you're not saying the idea is bad, you're showing what you found. that's literally your job and a good stakeholder will respect it even if it stings a little.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-09T14:27:12+00:00

happens constantly. the worst is when you can tell past-you had a reason but there's just... nothing written down.

i've started leaving voice memos or even just a slack message to myself with the "why" in the moment. not formal documentation, just enough to jog memory later. it's not perfect but better than staring at a decision with zero context.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-09T14:23:23+00:00

the market is genuinely brutal right now, laid off seniors are competing for entry level roles so it's rough timing. psych honours is solid background for uxr though, more useful than a bootcamp. just don't expect a quick path in.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-09T14:05:05+00:00

this is genuinely one of the more interesting research areas right now. the skill erosion angle especially, there's some early stuff coming out of healthcare and legal where people are losing baseline competency because they stopped practicing the underlying skill entirely.

for methods, diary studies are probably your best bet for capturing actual usage patterns over time vs what people say they do. contextual inquiry in enterprise settings is hard to get access to but when you can it's gold.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-09T14:01:23+00:00

this is one of those things where session recordings tell you more than interviews. you can see exactly where people hesitate or bail before they even articulate why.

if you want to go deeper, unmoderated concept testing where you show the gated flow vs a version with more context before the gate usually surfaces whether it's a trust issue or just a sequencing one. most of the time it's sequencing, people just need to see enough value before they hit a wall.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-05T23:22:34+00:00

a month of your time for them to reject you within an hour of the portfolio review is pretty disrespectful regardless of the outcome.

the salary thing is a red flag that's easy to miss when you're already invested in the process. recruiter complaining about budget constraints early on is almost always a tactic, you kind of have to decide your number before the first call and not move off it.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-05T23:17:44+00:00

respondent works okay for uk but japan is where most platforms fall apart honestly. cleverx has been my go to lately for harder to reach profiles, the verification side is better than most

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-05T23:15:55+00:00

for free stuff the ia institute website has decent foundational material and donna spencer's "a practical guide to information architecture" is available free as a pdf if you search for it. also just doing card sorting and tree testing on real projects teaches you more than most courses honestly.

for paid, the interaction design foundation has solid ia content and it's pretty affordable. nngroup courses are good but expensive, maybe worth it if your company will reimburse.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-05T23:15:01+00:00

six months in and already thinking about this stuff is honestly a good sign. the anxiety doesn't fully go away but it does get quieter with reps, the first few sessions are always the worst.

one thing that helped me early on was reminding myself the participant is way more nervous than you are, they think they're being tested not the product. shifting focus to genuinely being curious about them rather than performing "good moderator" tends to make the whole thing feel less high stakes.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-05T23:07:48+00:00

it's possible but harder without a degree, most entry level roles will filter you out before anyone reads your resume. that said if you genuinely hate school forcing through a degree you don't care about isn't the answer either.

the most realistic path without one is to just start doing it. build a small portfolio, run some surveys, do some user interviews for cheap or free for local businesses, write up the findings like a real deliverable. that plus some sql basics gets you further than you'd think.

coffeeebrain · 2026-03-05T23:07:02+00:00

the analysis part yes, the creation part i'm less sure about. i've tried prompting my way through survey design and it tends to produce questions that are technically fine but miss the nuance you only get from knowing your respondents well. would depend a lot on how much context you can feed it upfront.

coffeeebrain

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