A Guiding Light
Across my UX career, one of the pillars I’d always reference when trying to move UX forward is TurboTax. Can’t get buy-in on conversational forms? Look at TurboTax! People confused with long forms? Break them apart into focused questions… like TurboTax! Much credit for popularizing better, more human ways to engage with people using your product should go to their team of excellent UX designers. 15 years of evangelization has gone a long way and built many bridges.
More than that, TurboTax has been an aspirational North Star for many teams I’ve worked with. Whether the need is guiding a risk & compliance officer through the steps needed to successfully complete internal audits, nurses that need a more focused way to capture patient vitals on touch devices, or successfully guiding users through sending mass-messages in a disaster recovery platform they’ve likely never used before, TurboTax has been an inspiration. When people of all technological backgrounds and walks of life can use a product intuitively, you know a pattern really works.
A New Dawn For UI, Or A Lack Of
With all things, time moves on. In an era where tasks are becoming more abstracted from their tools every month, UI is not the first place savvy UXers look to solve problems. In 2026, the first question we should ask is what part of this process AI can solve or abstract away, and with this shift, I see TurboTax slowly falling from its pedestal.
Reduction of superfluous UI and abstraction of problem solving is the new measure of success. Less workflow UI means less for engineering and product teams to maintain, lower cognitive load for users, and quicker goal achievement from a Jobs To Be Done standpoint.
The rise of agentic AI is being met with a capability-first, security-second approach by technologies like OpenClaw and Moltbook. These are incredibly interesting tools and approaches to getting things done in a scrappy and entrepreneurial way, but they are not ready for enterprise scale environments. That is okay. Many organizations are just beginning to adopt tools like Lovable and Figma Make to accelerate business alignment and streamline design-to-engineering handoff.
Keeping An Understanding Keeps You Valuable
What has not changed is the responsibility of the designer (or whatever we call ourselves these days!) to stay current. If you keep an up-to-date understanding of the tools that are emerging, you begin to see the full range of what is actually possible. Not incremental improvements within today’s constraints, but the structural shifts that new capabilities unlock. When you understand what AI systems, automation platforms, and orchestration layers can realistically do, you stop designing around yesterday’s limitations.
That awareness matters because it quietly resets your expectations. You no longer assume that every requirement demands another screen, another workflow, or another handoff. You start asking better questions about elimination instead of optimization. You challenge inherited process instead of polishing it. The bar moves from making complex workflows slightly more tolerable to questioning why the complexity exists at all. This is the seat at the table designers have been talking about for decades.
When you walk into solutioning conversations with Product and Engineering leaders, you are expanding the solution space and speaking on level terms – THAT is real value for the team, before a single pixel is pushed in Figma or prompt is written. You have ideas or examples when an architect says “that can’t be done” or “that would take forever”. You can articulate what can be abstracted, what can be automated, and what can be reframed entirely. That shift turns a designer from being seen as the “how” person after an approach is picked to being part of the strategic conversation as someone shaping the direction of product & features. Be that person.