Insights from a United Nations UX Strategist: What the AI Era Means for Designers
A new kind of rigor, homogenized web, and designing for AI
I recently spoke with Justin Waugh, a designer and developer who has spent three decades navigating the space between code and craft. He described his pivotal role as ‘the bridge’ between development and design, two disciplines that often do not speak quite the same language. His career, including 13 years as a UX strategist at the United Nations (UNOPS), has been defined by translating intent across boundaries.
A New Kind of Rigor
Justin is no newcomer to AI tools. He’s been using LLMs since 2022, and his own journey mirrors the market’s maturation. He’s moved past vibe coding (just asking the AI to do things) to a more planned approach, where he directs the AI to write and implement whole specifications.
He’s now single-handedly building a web component library, a task he says would have needed a team of people before. This led us to the big question: Will designers need to become developers?
Justin sees it as a blurring of both things, with designers becoming more technical and developers becoming more design-aware. He’s even run an experiment where a UX designer with no coding knowledge successfully contributed a component to his library.
But he was quick to offer a warning. The AI only gets you maybe 80% of the way there. It still requires a degree of insight and skill to realize when the AI is making bad decisions. For this new workflow to succeed, a new rigor is required. Your Figma hygiene matters a great deal, he stressed. Tidy layers and a mastery of auto layout are essential for the AI to understand your intent.
The Defensive Skills
I asked him what other skills designers need to focus on. He didn’t mention prompts. He talked about defensive skills, the human-centric abilities that AI cannot replicate.
The most critical, he argued, is the ability to articulate your design decisions to stakeholders. As AI gets faster, the pressure to justify your choices will intensify. Why are you taking 3 weeks to make a decision when AI will do it in 15 seconds? Your answer to that question is where you prove your value.
He also pointed to co-creation and leading people on the journey so they buy into the solution. These are the skills of facilitation, empathy, and storytelling. All things that are currently well outside an AI’s grasp.
Taste, Judgment, and the Homogenized Web
This led us to the more subjective side of design. Justin brought up the ‘Tailwind CSS effect’ as an example—a homogenized approach where usability is high, but brand distinction is nonexistent. He warned that this is how your website ends up looking like everybody else’s.
AI, he fears, will accelerate this trend, learning from an already-homogenized web and reinforcing its own ‘slop.’ The antidote, he suggested, is taste and judgment.
How do you develop that? I asked.
By looking outside our discipline. He spoke of his own practice of talking to architects and service designers, to go and see what adjacent professions are doing and how they perceive value and quality. This cross-disciplinary curiosity is what will create distinction.
Read more of Justin’s thoughts on taste here: AI Doesn’t Need Taste – It’s Defining It.
Designing for AI
Late in our conversation, Justin shared his most profound insight. He’s been observing Google’s search results, which are now frequently replaced by Gemini summaries.
A lot of the time I get what I need from the Gemini search, he said. What this means to me is that many people are not going to visit websites... You’re designing for AI now, not for people.
This is the new reality. Your job is no longer just to design for a human user. It is to design your content, structure, and product so that an AI can understand it, value it, and present it as the answer.
He ended with a sharp warning. For mediocre designers and developers, AI is definitely going to eat your breakfast. Not because the AI is better, but because many stakeholders can’t tell the difference between good design and bad design.
In this new world, your job is not to be the best executor. Your job is to be the storyteller, the leader, and the final arbiter of taste. Your job is to be the human on the bridge.
If you’re curious to follow Justin’s work, he’s active in sharing his thoughts on LinkedIn and Medium. He also serves as a Local Leader for IxDF Copenhagen.
Until next post,
Thomas
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