UX is becoming less important in the age of AI?

The greatest invention of Sam Altman or OpenAI is not AI itself, but the natural conversational experience they created.

AI has been around for decades, and perhaps those who have been involved in the industry from the early days, when they first met ChatGPT, may have thought, “This is normal, I can do it too.” That’s right, what they couldn’t do was the idea of humans being able to talk to machines, just like the way humans talk to each other on the internet.

Humans are social creatures, and language and communication are the keys that make us superior to all other species on Earth.

To say this, you have to click your tongue, a simple-looking idea that is actually so amazing!

Will UX disappear?

In the software industry, UI & UX are of paramount importance.

Humans love beauty, and a software with a beautiful UI (user interface) will easily win the favor of users. UI is in the “look” part, not the “communication” part, so UI will still be there.

But UX is quite different. The role of UX emerges when users notice the difference between two apps that are equally beautiful, but one side is easy to use, and the other side is “some-kind-of-stupid”. UX shows the importance of communication between humans and software/computers. And it also makes some software developers stand out from the rest.

But with the advent of AI, the way humans interact with computers will change a lot.

Let’s try to answer this question: “Why are CMS, CRM, CDP software, project management tools (todo, kanban, …) very useful but very difficult to introduce into businesses? Kind of like everyone sees it as important, the company that applies it successfully will see clear results, but to put it into the process requires a lot of effort from the leadership and cooperation from the departments.”

Because they look complicated, right?

For an accountant, a manager who often goes to the field (works outside the computer more than on the computer), or a business leader, opening an application with a row of columns, buttons above and below, pages this page that, groping, … wow, this is clearly a very hard job!
Instead of doing those things themselves, they choose to ask someone more knowledgeable to query or perform the tasks they want.

Now, try replacing the phrase “more knowledgeable person” above with “AI”.

Voilà!

• “How many customers have birthdays this month? Send them a birthday promotion.”
• “What was the revenue for this month of last year?” -“How are the business results of the new product line? Propose optimization?”
• “Remind customers to use vouchers that are about to expire!”

Even if automation is applied, AI can also proactively notify and propose to the relevant people.

All are wrapped in “conversational snippets” — query and command — much simpler! (and does not encounter the barriers of “emotion” and “transparency” compared to doing it with humans)

In conclusion

UI & UX are still there and play an important role in product design, AI can’t replace UX either, because UX is a job that requires human-centric empathy, humans don’t even understand humans, let alone machines, AI is still a long way from reaching the level of “empathy”. But “optimizing UX” will no longer be the top priority, and will be forced to give way to the new king named AI.