The user experience of your product is constrained by multiple factors. Some of these constraints are technological in nature (ex: speed, scale). Some of these constraints are product-centric (ex: features, capabilities). And a number of these constraints are user-centric (ex: attention, comprehension).

One of the crafts of product design is creativity in the face of constraints, and being able to navigate within/around them tastefully and intelligently. Another craft of product design is having good judgement on determining which constraints are useful in nature, and what are limiting. Essentially, the combination of creativity and discretion is what feeds into well-designed user experiences.

For many products, the technological constraints have historically been mostly limiting in nature. We’ve been trained and conditioned to assume that the tech is holding us back from better possibilities & bigger opportunities for the user experience. With the rapid progress of GenAI, it is feeling different. For the first time in a long time, it feels like the tech is far more enabling than limiting us. And if anything, our products and user experiences need to catch up rapidly. Exciting!

But technological progress does not obviate the need & value of the other constraints further “up the stack”. In fact, it is worth pointing out that the new tech introduces both new possibilities and new limiters (ex: hallucinations). AI or not, your product still needs to be opinionated about its core value prop and JTBDs, which means you need to make choices about what features & capabilities you want to solve really well and seek to differentiate on. Your users will continue to present natural, human constraints that impact their ability to engage effectively with your product. They still need education, motivation, comprehension, intuition, emotional resonance and all the other things of that sort. The fact that our experiences need to account for user constraints is a feature, not a bug! These constraints are what unlock inner creativity and outer elegance that is the hallmark of great UX.

So while we get excited about the technological progress, let’s be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater in terms of product design. I see some of this come up recently in discussions about agentic AI that will seemingly replace the need for human interactions at all. In my opinion, the best designed products will - like always - lean into the most useful constraints, and leapfrog past the most limiting constraints. And the most useful constraints are the ones that are closest and most meaningful to our end users.

-- Waqas https://x.com/vixsheikh https://substack.com/@waqassheikh