Design is Not Only About Design in AI Era.

In 2025, I joined the design team at HeyGen in Los Angeles. HeyGen just joined the '$100M ARR club of AI startups' alongside peers like Cursor. At there, I witnessed how the AI products been designed in a rapidly changing and ambiguous environment.

I’ve come to realize that in the AI era, product designers' role is not only about using clean UI to solve simple UX problems, is about to optimize how we toggle the output of AI, such as helping users better prompt during wait time, encouraging them to give feedbacks for reinforced learning, and basically anything making human and AI collaborate better.

For product designers, helping achieve PMF and profitability is certainly important, but taking the time to reflect on the essence of interaction can elevate their output to the next level.

The most profound UX design breakthroughs I’ve witnessed this year focus on The Explicit CoT( chain of thinking) from Claude AI, Turning the 'black box' into a glass box through transparent reasoning helps user trusts the AI more. Other companies did this include Perplexity, V0.dev, Deepseek, etc.

While AI can now automate the alignment of margins and the generation of layouts, it cannot invent new paradigms for human-machine partnership. The next 'entry point' for the world’s information won't be won by the best model, it will be won by the company that invents the most intuitive way for a human to direct it.

Jan, 2026, Manhattan