AI won’t end UX, but it will end its Dribbblization. Good

The end of UX-as-aesthetic-performance-art. AI will stop the drift of UX away from its scientific and social roots.

UX design was never meant to be a visual discipline. It emerged from cognitive psychology, anthropology, ergonomics, and human-computer interaction, and so on. Yes, from fields concerned with how people think, behave, and struggle with systems. Remember Jane Goodall and those chimpanzees?

Another shameless use of ChatGPT

Except, UX came to be conflated with, and dominated by visual design culture. UX was reshaped by the portfolio brigade. The result is what we might call *Dribbblized UX*: a practice obsessed with polished screens, hero shots, UI kits, and aesthetic consistency, totally detached from real users, doing real jobs, in real places: contexts.

In many organisations today, “UX Designer” has become shorthand for interface production: refining layouts, feeding design systems, and iterating Figma screens for stakeholder approval. Research is often reduced, cognition is simplified, and “user-centred” becomes a slide deck slogan rather than a practice. The words “quantitative data” bring on mass cardiac arrests at UX meetups.

AI is now exceptionally good at producing dribbblized experiences: generating interfaces, variations, and design system–compliant screens in seconds. If UX is primarily understood as turning requirements into attractive UI, then AI will outperform it on speed, scale, and cost almost immediately. Visual design and the pixellers got stitched up, if you like.

But AI does not threaten actual UX. It threatens the pixel-pushers and the art school aesthetes that saw an opportunity to put lipstick on the pig of their own disciplines. You know the type.

What remains valuable is what AI cannot easily replicate: framing problems, understanding behaviour, conducting meaningful research, interpreting ambiguity, and making ethical, system-level decisions.

The future of UX was never visual production, or moving pixels around a screen. AI has exposed UX for what it has largely become and what it’s missing: applied human understanding.

AI won’t end UX. But it will end its Dribbblization, and help get UX back to what it was supposed to be about in the first place. But that requires also humans who have or developed the soft skills to make that human touch effective.