If you're wondering where your design job will be in 6 months or a year, you're in good company.
AI tools keep changing, and so do the ways people use them. Some designers are even asking if they should switch industries.
So last week, I brought this topic on the show.
My guest was Jeremy Miller, a Design Lead at Xometry with 20+ years in design. He wrote Beyond UX Design, hosts a podcast of the same name, leads a Cub Scout den, and just got a puppy called Archibald Wolfington F. Dogbottom III.
We covered 3 main things:
1. What the UX Uncertainty Principle is v
It's Jeremy's name for one idea:
Your design shapes the user's experience, but a lot of other things shape it too, and you don't control most of them.
- Engineers ship bugs
- Support can be great or awful
- Marketing promises features that were never on the roadmap
Users also bring their own hardware, habits, and quirks. Personas are averages, and no real person is the average.
What a designer does control is the craft and the relationships.
It plays on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: there is a limit to knowing exactly what is happening
Jeremy applies it to UX.
So the principle comes down to this: master what you control, and spend time on the things around it that only you can influence.
2. Tactics and strategies to navigate VUCA
VUCA stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. It came out of military thinking after the Soviet Union collapsed, and Jeremy first ran into it in leadership training at GE.
Each one is a different problem and needs a different response. He walked through AI as the example:
- Volatile (things keep changing) → Try lots of tools. You don't need to be an expert in all of them.
- Uncertain (hard to forecast) → Have a backup plan. Would your skills transfer if your main tool went away?
- Complex (changing one thing changes something else somewhere else) → How would something you design have a knock-on effect on: user's experience, the system, or engineering delivering the work?
- Ambiguous (nobody knows where the job goes) → Run small, fast experiments to get more information.
Complicated and complex also mean different things.
A beef wellington recipe is complicated: lots of steps, but you follow them. Complex is when changing one thing changes something else somewhere else.
One experiment he suggested is the fake door: a button that goes nowhere, and you count the clicks. He figures that would have saved him time on his own personal projects.
I added a Bezos idea during the chat: focus on what won't change. For design, that's collaboration, relationships, and fundamental craft.
3. How relationships help you in times of chaos
Relationships help twice.
They get you better insights from stakeholders, and they let you share those insights so the team acts on them. Great craft alone won't win the team over, so you have to get them to understand why the design is good.
He dislikes the term "soft skills" because these are skills you have to have. His examples:
- Slack messages can land differently than you meant them
- Small talk matters more now that remote work killed the water cooler
- One stakeholder only replied to the first line of his long emails, so he switched to quick TLDR bullets
By "relationships" he means good working ones, not buddies or a "we're a family" setup. His first 1:1 with anyone new covers how he works and what he expects.
I'd add one from my workshop days. The sales guys on our team did 5 minutes of small talk before every client call, and every workshop I saw them in went smoother.
What Jeremy said that stuck with me:
"You cannot build great software without great relationships because software is hard."
Most of what I've learned in 10+ years of UX comes down to one thing: communicate the value of your work, don't assume anyone knows or cares about it, and reframe the problem.
When everything feels ambiguous, reframe (VUCA is a good framework for this), talk to people, check the data, run a small test. What's ambiguous now might be clear in 6 months, but only if you go look.
More from Jeremy:
- Beyond UX Design → his podcast and book, Master Your Craft, Beyond Pixels and Prototypes, which has a full VUCA chapter.
- Cognition Catalog → a series on cognitive biases and how they affect teams, with a new episode every other week.
We also got into imposter syndrome, why the classic step 1 to 10 portfolio might need a rethink, and why he's been laid off twice and still builds side projects.
Watch the full livestream ↓
