AI Meets UX: The Playbook for Future-Proof Design w/ Nick Cawthon

Get ready to level up your design game. In this episode of Design Shift, veteran UX strategist Nick Cawthon (founder of Gauge and professor of Data Literacy at CCA) breaks down how to stay indispensable when AI can generate a wireframe in seconds. We cover why direction beats deliverables, how to anchor machine learning in human insight, and what happens when design and engineering finally merge.🔑 What you’ll learnThe new definition of design in an AI-saturated worldA step-by-step playbook for scaling research with 40 M data points—without losing empathyHow “prompt-engineered” Design Ops collapses hand-offs and saves dev cyclesNick’s 3-year learning plan for future-proof careers⏱ Key insights…0:00 Opener1:08 Meet Nick Cawthon – 25-year UX veteran2:38 AltaVista to Gauge: forging a data-driven career10:43 Design is direction, not deliverables14:58 UI vs UX vs Usability: emotion over pixels16:11 Uber’s “moving cars” trick for micro-delight21:08 40 M Airbnb reviews: AI starts with qual hypotheses22:38 Why Double-Diamond skills still matter35:07 Hybrid “diamond-shaped” orgs win36:08 Design Ops becomes prompt-engineering44:03 “Figma isn’t the web” – prototype in live code46:08 Near-production hand-offs & component libraries56:58 Nick’s 3-year learning plan59:53 Take the free AI-readiness assessment at retrain.gauge.io🔗 Resources• Gauge: https://gauge.io• AI-Readiness Self-Assessment: https://retrain.gauge.io👉 Subscribe for weekly deep dives on design leadership, innovation, and the future of work. Smash that 👍 if you find value, and drop your questions for Nick in the comments—we might answer them in the next episode!#UXDesign #AI #DesignLeadership #ProductDesign #NickCawthon #Gauge #GenerativeAI #DesignOps

There are no comments yet.

Please log in to write the first comment.