2026-07-12 · 5 min read · Raw Drafts / UX / Careers
The Further You Go in UX, the Less It Looks Like UX
What fourteen University of Washington speakers reveal about where influence, compensation, and professional value migrate as UX careers advance.
The University of Washington recently invited fourteen people to speak about the future of user experience.
They came from Home Depot, Databricks, Google, Xbox, Expedia, Toyota Research Institute, Instagram, Microsoft AI, Harvard, and the university itself. On paper, it looks like a conventional UX speaker series: designers, researchers, managers, academics, and technology executives talking to the next generation of practitioners.
Then you read what they actually spoke about.
Almost nobody was talking about interfaces.
They were talking about organizational influence, civic institutions, generational bias, AI model behaviour, synthetic populations, business transformation, and the possible disappearance of UX research.
The series was ostensibly about UX. Its real subject was what happens after UX stops being about designing screens.
Follow the career ladder
The progression is almost too neat.
Nicole Washington, a Product Designer II at Xbox, represents something close to recognizable product design: research, strategy, visual design, accessibility, collaboration with engineering, and alignment between user needs and business outcomes.
This is the version of UX most people enter the industry expecting to do.
Move upward, and the work changes.
Sena Janky, a UX manager with more than 25 years of experience, spoke about designing influence and advocating for UX across an organization. The output expands beyond the product. The organization itself becomes the interface that has to be redesigned.
Eva Snee, a UX director at Databricks, went one level further. Her subject was whether UX research can continue to exist in its current form. She described a profession caught between layoffs, changing expectations, and the need to reinvent itself before it loses relevance.
At Microsoft AI, Jess Holbrook works on model behaviour, tools for thought, and community-based research. Mike Davidson, the corporate vice president responsible for design and research, is accountable for the level of craft and consideration across Microsoft AI's customer experiences.
Their jobs still contain the letters U and X.
The unit of design, however, has expanded from a screen to a model, an organization, a portfolio of products, and potentially an entire relationship between people and artificial intelligence.
The money follows leverage
We do not know what these individuals personally earn. Salary databases can estimate compensation for comparable roles, but they cannot reveal someone's bank account, investments, or accumulated wealth.
The broad pattern is still visible.
A competent product designer can earn very well. A principal designer earns more. A director who coordinates multiple teams and affects product strategy earns more again. The largest compensation packages tend to appear where someone's decisions influence entire organizations, major platforms, or the behaviour of products used by hundreds of millions of people.
The market pays for leverage.
It pays for deciding which problems receive resources. It pays for turning uncertain research into organizational direction. It pays for coordinating design, engineering, policy, and business. It pays for reducing the probability that an expensive system does something catastrophically stupid.
This creates an awkward hidden curriculum for anyone studying UX.
You may enter because you enjoy understanding people and making good products. To acquire greater authority and compensation, you are gradually encouraged to spend less time doing the visible work and more time shaping the conditions under which other people do it.
The career ladder leads away from the object that attracted many people to the field.
UX has become a placeholder word
The speaker series includes a conversation about civic technology, where human-centred design can either support or impede democratic practice.
It includes Carolyn Wei explaining how researchers can study generations whose lived experiences differ from their own without projecting assumptions onto them.
It includes Toyota Research Institute presenting generative systems that combine sketching with machine-generated inspiration and allow designers to ideate with synthetic populations.
These are related practices, but calling all of them UX starts to feel like calling everything involving numbers accounting.
UX now functions as a loose institutional container for questions that companies have not assigned elsewhere:
Who is this for?
What happens when people use it?
What assumptions are embedded in the system?
How should an AI behave?
How do we know whether the product is helping?
How do we persuade the company to care?
What should be built in the first place?
The discipline became larger partly because technology became larger. A website once had pages and buttons. An AI product has policies, probabilities, memory, personality, training data, failure modes, and an unclear boundary between tool and actor.
The screen is now the thinnest visible layer of the product.
There is also a trap here
It would be easy to conclude that everyone should abandon craft and become a strategist.
That would reproduce one of the industry's oldest mistakes: treating proximity to management as evidence of importance.
Mike Davidson's biography makes a point of saying that he still pushes pixels and writes designer-level code every week.
The fact that this is notable tells us something.
Senior practitioners can become so distant from the material they govern that continued contact with the product becomes a charming exception.
Influence without craft produces presentations.
Craft without influence produces work that never survives contact with the organization.
The useful territory lies between them: enough material understanding to recognize what quality looks like, and enough institutional leverage to make quality possible.
After the interface
A narrower version of UX is probably dying.
The version based on predictable flows, static interfaces, usability testing, and control over every interaction is becoming harder to defend as a complete profession. AI can already generate plausible screens. Product teams increasingly share basic design capabilities. Research is being compressed, automated, or absorbed into other roles.
What remains is harder to automate because it is also harder to define.
It is deciding which futures are worth making probable.
It is understanding the system around the interface: the incentives, institutions, datasets, power structures, and human consequences that determine what the product eventually becomes.
The most senior people in UX barely seem to be doing UX anymore.
That may be the clearest description of where UX is going.
AI authorship note
This essay began with Kris Haamer's questions about the University of Washington UX Speaker Series, what its speakers earn, and the central message of each talk. AI supported research, synthesis, drafting, editing, and implementation. Kris is responsible for the editorial direction, career framing, and decision to publish it.