Emily Campbell Co-founder & Product @ BookClub

“We are no longer building the thing people interact with. Increasingly, we're building the thing that determines the thing that people interact with. … Now we're moving into this world where the humans on the other side are the ones determining their experience. We're just shaping the ecosystem.”

Finding Our Way · User Experience · November 2026

Context

Asked how AI changes design as a function, design leader Emily Campbell gives this as one of several shifts she sees, and the reason her team has to change how it defines and tests good design.

Listen to the episode → More from Emily Campbell → More User Experience quotes →

Transcript

Finding Our Way Around 15:43 into the episode

Emily Campbell

…But this whole AI, AI UX, Agentic UX, everything that we're working with right now is evolving so fast that the truth or the source of truth is evolving along with it. And so, yeah, it's been this project of just trying to understand this moving target and then be intentional about working with it.

Jesse James Garrett

…it was really designed to facilitate conversations. And it's interesting to think about designers as facilitators of conversation and that as being part of what we do in design as a function. And I'm curious about, I guess, your thoughts on how AI impacts how we think about design as a function.

Emily Campbell

…and these buttons and this information and maybe there's some different. Depending on what their role is inside of the organization or the content inside of their algorithm, but we had a lot of control over the bounding box. And so that's where we'd use like usability testing to say, did we build this right? Can people use this the way we expected to do this thing we think they're trying to do? Now we're moving into this world where the humans on the other side are the ones determining their experience. We're just shaping the ecosystem. And so there, I think it's just the role of the design and the thing that we're creating is more abstracted away from like a screen that we are drawing a picture of. And so again, it really forces us to change the conversation about what are we trying to build? How do we know if it's good? What are the risks? What are the different scenarios somebody might be in? And it just forces a change of…

Peter Merholz

Something that's been addressed a fair bit in the last year or two when it comes to design and AI is the opportunity for even more personalized experiences, I guess, where every user can have some user experience that is distinct to them thanks to the AI having done some work. I kind of want to…

Emily Campbell

No, I think you're totally right. And I mean, the reality is we've had some degree of generative experiences because we've been living in this algorithmic world since, you know, 2006 when Facebook launched, since these algorithmic platforms started to take over our life. And I think we need to…

Peter Merholz

So, some of this reminds me of when Jesse and I were little web design babies. And we, like, I worked for a graphic design firm in 1990, make sure I get the timing right, 1996. So, as it was embracing the web, I was a web developer there. And one of the biggest frustrations I had is helping graphic…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Finding Our Way

“Don't convince people. Don't try. Just offer the thing, offer the better way of doing something, offer the better design, offer the better practice. And if they don't want to do it, they probably have a good reason. And trying to trick them into doing it is not worth your time.” — Clay Parker Jones, Finding Our Way

“In large organizations, so much of the conversation ends up being about, oh, well, we don't have role clarity. And it's something people say when they are trying not exactly to avoid taking action, but it often allows people to do that.” — Clay Parker Jones, Finding Our Way