Adapt or disappear: the future of Product Designers

  • Updated: 28 January 2025
  • 6 minutes
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2025 will be the year of strategic Design. The direct consequence for Designers is clear: they must step out of their bubbles and position themselves as key drivers of business performance and innovation. Generative AI, hyper-personalization, holistic CX... The challenges are immense, but the opportunity is undeniable: enhance Design’s impact on business and push the boundaries of creativity. In this article, Thomas Vidal, Partner at Thiga and Head of Design currently leading a mission at Accor as Head of Design, calls for a radical transformation: orchestrate, influence, and place Design at the heart of strategic decisions to shape the future of companies.

2025 marks a turning point for Design. Today, being a Designer means being at the core of the action: collaborating closely with Product, Business, and Tech teams to create solutions that are both innovative and aligned with economic objectives. Far from opposing creativity and pragmatism, it’s about combining these two forces to meet the challenges of a constantly evolving market. It’s clear that those who do not embrace this transformation risk disappearing.

Today, companies expect Designers to bring measurable value, influence strategic choices, and adapt to increasing economic constraints while remaining creative. Staying in an isolated position, outside the company’s strategy, is to risk seeing one’s role marginalized or even replaced by automation tools, such as generative AI. On the other hand, transforming means staying relevant and securing one’s place in a constantly changing world.

This transformation imposes major challenges, with several key themes central to this transformation.

Strategic Design: creating impact and taking a central role

In 2025, Designers will need to do more than just improve experiences. Why? To be perceived as true strategic partners capable of directly influencing key business decisions. This evolution requires a broader approach, where Design becomes an essential lever.

Integrating business value

Design must fully integrate into the strategic dynamics of the company by collaborating closely with Product, Tech, and Business teams. This involves:

  • Alignment on shared OKRs: Defining clear, measurable objectives shared with all stakeholders to ensure a direct contribution of Design to strategic priorities.

  • Regular impact measurement: Demonstrating how Design actions influence outcomes, whether it’s increased revenue, improved customer satisfaction, or cost reduction.

  • A strengthened partnership with decision-makers: Integrating Design into strategic discussions from the earliest stages of planning so its impact is anticipated and maximized.

Seamless experiences to stand out

In an environment where companies manage numerous products and services, the challenge is not only to stand out but also to ensure a seamless, consistent experience for users in a saturated and challenging market.

Design plays a key role here as a unifying factor:

  • Creating overall consistency: Ensuring that every product and every interaction reflects the brand’s values and delivers a smooth, intuitive experience across all touchpoints.

  • Implementing shared tools: Leveraging robust Design Systems to standardize practices and accelerate the creation of aligned experiences at scale.

Responsible Design as a Value creator

In the digital landscape, responsible Design is not limited to addressing societal and environmental issues. It represents an opportunity to create sustainable value for both users and businesses. Here’s how Design can play this key role:

  • Designing efficient, eco-friendly interfaces: Reducing the carbon footprint of digital products through optimized designs, lightweight systems, and responsible resource management.

  • Combining responsibility and performance: Demonstrating that responsible choices—such as accessibility or eco-Design—can also strengthen user engagement, loyalty, and the efficiency of digital journeys. In this way, Design addresses societal challenges while contributing to growth and profitability.

  • Measuring impact at all levels: Incorporating concrete metrics to show how responsible Design improves environmental performance, user experience, and business outcomes.

By fully embracing these opportunities, Designers become critical players in transforming companies. In 2025, they must not only imagine and create but also influence, evolve, and measure. Only by doing so will Design reach its full potential.

Generative AI: boosting speed without compromising creativity

In 2025, generative artificial intelligence will continue to deeply transform the role of Designers. While it offers unique opportunities to automate certain tasks and accelerate processes, it also enables the Design of tomorrow’s experiences by strengthening data integration while allowing impact measurement. The challenge lies in leveraging these capabilities while ensuring ethics, humanity, and creativity remain central to our discipline.

Collaborating with AI to increase efficiency and productivity

Generative AI must be seen as a work partner that enhances Designers’ capabilities throughout the design cycle, from the discovery phase to delivery. Here are some examples:

  • Automated prototyping: Quickly generating wireframes, mockups, or even functional interfaces based on strategic inputs.

  • Large-scale user testing: Simulating user behaviors to identify friction points and refine solutions before production.

  • Integrated productivity tools: Embedding AI into workflows to optimize Design discovery processes, improve collaboration, and accelerate the production of deliverables aligned with objectives. These tools will reduce repetitive, time-consuming tasks, allowing Design teams to focus on the strategic and creative aspects of their mission.

This collaboration will enable Design teams to focus on higher-value tasks, such as strategic thinking and designing memorable experiences.

Ensuring ethics and creativity are not compromised

While AI can accelerate the design process, it also raises significant challenges in terms of ethics and responsibility:

  • Avoiding algorithmic bias: Designers must work at the earliest stages to ensure that AI-generated solutions do not replicate or amplify existing biases.

  • Ensuring inclusivity: Making sure that AI-powered systems are accessible to all, regardless of origin, abilities, or language.

  • Preserving true creativity: While AI can suggest solutions, it is up to Designers to give them meaning and ensure they meet strategic and emotional objectives.

Embedding AI into user journeys and rethinking experiences

Integrating AI into user journeys is not just about adding features; it is about completely rethinking the way we design and interact with systems. Intelligent flows powered by AI pave the way for enhanced personalization and completely reimagined interaction models:

  • Personalizing experiences at scale: Using AI to adapt user journeys in real-time, based on preferences, context, and collected data. Each user can thus enjoy a unique experience perfectly aligned with their expectations.

  • Rethinking interaction models: Moving beyond traditional prompts to integrate intelligent assistants capable of understanding intentions, anticipating needs, and delivering relevant responses or actions smoothly and proactively.

  • Transforming system designing: Revolutionizing experiences by making AI omnipresent yet invisible, creating natural, frictionless interactions where technology fades into an apparent simplicity.

In 2025, Designers will not simply adapt to AI’s evolution—they will guide and influence its application.

This approach proposes a true evolution (or even revolution) in standards, with users interacting with systems that are intuitive, personalized, and centered on their real needs. While prompts marked an important milestone, they do not represent the long-term future: systems must become autonomous, intuitive, and seamlessly integrated into everyday experiences.

In 2025, Designers will not simply adapt to AI’s evolution—they will guide and influence its application, always placing the user at the center for a lasting and meaningful impact. Designers must abandon current paradigms to invent interactions that are more human, more fluid, and more relevant with AI—a return to creativity, in essence.

Hyper-personalization: the key to performance

Hyper-personalization is both a natural evolution and the concrete application of AI in digital Design: using data and algorithms to create experiences which are fully tailored to the needs, expectations, and contexts of each user. This represents a major opportunity for brands and a significant challenge for Designers in several ways:

Adaptive interfaces

Creating hyper-personalized experiences requires Designers to completely rethink how they design. This necessitates a flexible approach, where every element of a product can adapt to fluctuating needs without compromising overall consistency (e.g., planning templates for different scenarios).

This means reworking design processes by applying adaptive logic, ensuring a fluid and intuitive experience while accounting for hundreds of variation points within a product, not just between different products.

A return to detail

Hyper-personalization also marks a strong return to attention to detail in Design. Personalized experiences must not only be adapted; they must be innovative, engaging, and visually striking. This involves:

  • Creating high-level micro-interactions that evoke emotion and make every interaction memorable.

  • Elevating brand identity: Hyper-personalization strengthens the bond between the user and the brand, but this cannot happen without a solid Design System ensuring consistency and excellence at every touchpoint.

  • Revisiting creativity in detail: Returning to an approach where every pixel, every transition, every animation contributes to an engaging, innovative, and unforgettable experience.

Hyper-personalization thus pushes Designers to go far beyond functional adaptation to offer deeply immersive experiences connected to the very essence of the brand.

A CX strategy that extends beyond the digital sphere

Today, Customer Experience (CX) remains a complex subject. Even within the digital realm, companies still struggle to deliver truly complete, seamless, and consistent experiences shared by all parties involved. This becomes even more obvious when extending these experiences beyond digital.

In 2025, Designers are invited to conceive global experiences that blend digital and physical to:

  • Integrate omnichannel journeys: Ensure continuity between physical touchpoints (stores, hotels) and digital ones.

  • Leverage immersive technologies: Augmented reality, connected devices, and multisensory experiences will become key tools to enrich the customer experience.

  • Create memorable moments: Focus on emotional experiences that leave a lasting impression on users.

While hyper-personalization addresses individual user expectations, holistic CX goes further by unifying all dimensions of an experience. A truly holistic CX will require Designers to collaborate closely with Business, Tech, and Marketing teams to anchor every interaction within a shared vision.

As you can see, 2025 is the year when digital Design must transcend its status as a creative discipline: it must become a driver of strategic impact. However, this transformation does not mean abandoning the essence of Design: creativity, emotion, and innovation. On the contrary, it involves developing these qualities rigorously, with every decision guided by data (and more), and aligned with a clear strategy.

Rejecting this evolution means risking marginalization. Embracing it, however, means establishing oneself as a central player in change, capable of transforming not only products but also organizations.

Those who rise to these challenges will emerge stronger, ready to guide their companies in a constantly evolving world where Design is no longer a function but an indispensable force for resilience and innovation.

But it is also a unique opportunity: the chance to become more impactful, more strategic, and to demonstrate that Designers can shape not only products, but also the future of businesses. By embracing this expanded role, they establish themselves as true change-makers.

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