The UX Reckoning: Prepare for 2025 and Beyond
Summary: In 2025, reevaluate tactics; use AI to deliver user value; and develop deep UX skills, instead of relying on toolkits.
It’s a tough time to be a UX professional. Pessimism, disillusionment, and frustration are widespread. Whether you have a UX job or you’re looking for one, you’re probably familiar with the feeling. Predictions for the future of UX are rife with pessimism, with few suggestions for what we can do about it.
The bad news: a lot of the factors contributing to the current situation are outside of your control. The good news: UX has always been like this (more or less). And there are things you can do to improve your situation in 2025 and beyond.
UX on the Chopping Block
The AI hype cycle has triggered a massive influx of investments into tech — hundreds of billions of US dollars in 2024 alone. But it doesn’t feel like we’re back where we were immediately post COVID, when companies competed to hire design talent. Instead, 2024 felt like a continuation of hard times, as raising interest rates cut down on the cheap cash flowing into tech. Tech giants began to cut staff, and design departments in many other industries followed. In 2023, UX job postings dropped roughly to 70% of their 2021 levels, according to Indeed .
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