Remember when being a great designer meant crafting pixel-perfect interfaces? When slick animations and clean layouts were enough to impress a room?
That world is fading fast.
Frameworks, component libraries, and now AI-powered tools have raised the baseline. Every product looks decent. Every product works. You can get to passable usability in a weekend with the right prompts and a good eye.
But that’s the point: “usable” is no longer impressive. It’s invisible.
If you’re a designer today, your value doesn’t come from making things work. It comes from making things matter.
This post is for those of us who are in it, not to ship screens, but to shape meaning. It’s what I’ve learned designers must know, do, and focus on to succeed within the companies we work for.
Know the new playing field
The design landscape has shifted, and it’s still shifting fast. Here’s the reality:
- You don’t need a designer to reach decent UX anymore. AI, templates, and design systems can get teams to “good enough.”
- Most products today are functional. The question is no longer, “Can users complete the task?” It’s, “Why should they care?”
- Differentiation is emotional, not functional. In a saturated market, what keeps people loyal isn’t just performance—it’s how a product makes them feel.
The bar has moved. Usability earns you permission. Emotion earns loyalty. Story earns trust.
And that’s good news. Because those last two, loyalty and trust, are still very human problems to solve.
The moment it clicked for me
I started feeling this shift before the coding agents, before everyone started wondering if design was becoming obsolete.
It actually began when I switched to Arc browser.
At first, I thought I loved the features: how it hides distractions when I need to focus, how I can curate different “spaces” for different mindstates. But the more I used it, the more I realized something deeper was happening.
Arc made me feel different about myself. It didn’t just help me work, it made me feel like someone who works with clarity and purpose. Like a more intentional version of myself. It wasn’t just a browser; it was a mirror to who I aspired to be.
That experience was the seed. It planted a question: What if the real value of design isn’t utility, but identity?
Back then, I was just beginning to reconsider the role of a designer. Now, with AI tools making functional design easy and accessible, I fully believe it:
People don’t fall in love with working. They fall in love with meaning.
When I watch people use products they genuinely love, they’re not talking about efficiency gains. They’re talking about how it fits into their life. How Notion makes them feel organized, how Figma makes them feel collaborative. The function enables the feeling, but the feeling creates the attachment.
Usability is just permission
Usability earns you a shot at the user—nothing more. If your product simply works, congratulations: you’ve reached the starting line.
But function alone won’t keep people around.
Because in saturated markets where every product works, the real competition is emotional and narrative.
Over the years, I’ve come to see product design work as three distinct layers:
Permission layer → Usability
Can users accomplish their goal without confusion?
This is table stakes. AI can generate working flows, components, even responsive layouts. If your product just works, you earn a chance with the user. Nothing more.
Loyalty layer → Emotion
What makes your product feel worth coming back to?
Design emotionally resonant moments. Think playful animations, delightful microcopy, intentional friction, or elegant polish that feels handcrafted. That’s the emotional moat, the part AI can mimic but not master.
Trust layer → Story
What larger narrative makes users believe in you?
People stick with products that reinforce a story about who they are—or who they want to become. Your story lives in onboarding, in empty states, in emails, in the way you show up as a company.
In saturated markets, layers 2 and 3 are what make users stay. They’re still human. And they’re your job.
“Design isn’t merely visual appeal or functional efficiency—it’s a worldview, YOUR worldview, translated into tangible form.” —Tobias van Schneider
Look at companies like Linear. It doesn’t build project management software. It has built an identity around what quality software should feel like.
Every keyboard shortcut, animation, and release note reinforces that belief.
An LLM cannot create that. That’s design with a worldview.
Expand your value without doing everything
Let’s be real: it’s exhausting to be told you need to do it all: design, code, research, run workshops, write strategy decks, and fix culture. That’s not sustainable.
But you do need range. Not to do everything, but to understand enough to collaborate and shape the outcome. That’s the messy part of design within companies. And it’s not overhead.
The conversations, trade-offs, and invisible web of agreements that actually determine what ships? That’s design work too.
And that work won’t disappear. It’s just moved upstream and downstream of the pixels.
Upstream (Before anything is designed)
- Clarify the vision: What change are we trying to make in people’s lives?
- Frame the emotional arc: Who does the user want to become?
- Build the invisible web of agreements that lets teams move as one.
Downstream (After it ships)
- Map the “aha” path. Make first value moments obvious and fast.
- Keep the story coherent across emails, docs, release notes and marketing page.
- Push for consistency and small touches that compound over time.
“Prototype not just products, but principles. Lead with values, not just velocity.”—Carly Ayres
What actually matters now
If you’re just starting out, here’s what I wish someone had told me:
Develop different muscles
Design isn’t just about craft anymore. It’s about connection.
You need to be:
- An amateur anthropologist spotting cultural patterns
- A business strategist who understands value
- A storyteller who creates coherence across moments
- A facilitator who can align teams around shared purpose
Embrace the mess
The hardest work isn’t design craft.
It’s:
- Treating alignment as design work, not a distraction from it
- Defending “invisible” details that make all the difference
- Convincing leadership that emotional metrics matter
- Aligning teams around a shared story
Because here’s the thing: alignment feels slow, but launching without it is worse. When human coordination breaks down, the result is duplicate work, confused customers, and features that miss the mark.
Where we go from here
If organizations don’t evolve, from chasing efficiency to cultivating meaning, they won’t just fall behind. They’ll become irrelevant.
Users will leave. Market share will erode. And no amount of growth hacks will fix it.
Because the machinery wasn’t built for empathy. It was built for optimization.
We can’t automate care. We can’t systematize taste. We can’t outsource purpose.
But we can build with intention. We can make things that matter, not just because they function, but because they help people feel something, become something, believe something.
In today’s market, it’s not just about solving problems. It’s about helping users become who they want to be.*
This shift is uncomfortable. It means letting go of some of what made us feel valuable before. But it also opens up more interesting problems to solve.
The shift is related to the question of how value creation evolves as technologies mature. Work doesn’t disappear, but shifts to more complex, more human challenges. The question isn’t whether design work will remain valuable, but whether we can develop our skills fast enough to stay ahead of the commoditization curve.