Expanding their roles from creators of screens and end-to-end experiences, designers are increasingly becoming curators of taste and of ever more complex systems and ecosystems.

In a time characterized by the sheer speed of change, design leader and Head of Design for Trello at Atlassian, Sarah Karp, stresses the importance of learning fast, ruthlessly prioritizing, and truly knowing the customer.

So, what can we expect for the future of design? We sat down with Sarah to discuss the changing nature of customer interaction, the challenges and opportunities of doing more with less, and her predictions for the future of design now that AI is everywhere.

Tessa: You’ve talked about how teams are increasingly being asked to do more with less. How do you think that constraint is reshaping the design process, and what challenges and opportunities do you see?

Sarah: The ideal and positive answer is that we’re learning to get scrappier and a little more creative. We have to ruthlessly prioritize a lot more, but I do think it’s forced us to say, “Okay, we have to move fast, so what should we do less of in order to maximize our impact?” We are running with a lot of assumptions, and people are leaning on research and customer insights to help them move faster, which is fantastic. 

There’s a double-edged reality here. On the positive side, teams are becoming more creative and decisive, abandoning those painfully drawn-out, months-long processes that frankly took too long. But there’s a darker side where teams cut corners on research quality or simply defer to whoever advocates loudest for their assumptions. This amplifies an age-old industry problem: how do you prevent the loudest voice from winning? With so much work happening asynchronously now, it’s easier than ever to cherry-pick insights that validate your existing opinion. The challenge for designers is navigating this faster pace while maintaining research integrity and ensuring decisions are grounded in genuine user understanding, not just the most persuasive argument in the room.

Tessa: With AI accelerating how teams build, agility is crucial. How do you think large organizations can become more agile and responsive to change while maintaining a focus on the customer?

Sarah: We need to figure out how to focus on really fast learning. We cannot predict what’s happening with AI. We see announcements from the likes of OpenAI, Google, and of course Atlassian and Dovetail that transform our industries in a matter of days. One of my designers said it eloquently today: “We can’t predict what users need because users don’t even know what they need in this world.” It’s an insane time to be designing for people. On top of that, there’s a lot of fear around AI, and it’s not cheap in terms of how it runs and how data is stored. 

So, anything you can do to validate through quick, fast learning moments is key. We’re trying to get better with rapid prototyping, which AI tools are unlocking because you can prototype almost anything. But we’re really trying to get better at researching those ideas before they ship, which is an expensive process. 

I also think having insights so readily available has made people much more responsive to how customers are feeling. People can more quickly tap into why customers might be reacting a certain way. They can map those insights and compare them to data analytics. There is a wealth of knowledge available right now—it’s just a matter of what we do with it.

Tessa: How do you see the relationship between design and research changing?

Sarah: I think the lines are blurring, in a good way. At Atlassian, PMs and designers started to become accountable for owning more research. That has helped designers become more research-literate. Researchers, because they’re so stretched thin, have had to become more design and product-aware. 

I’m seeing researchers talking much more with designers and engineers about how to bring prototypes to testing and how they can innovate on what was previously a rigid research practice. One of the bigger changes is how we’re collaborating. There’s no more of this traditional handoff model—research and design are happening in tandem. 

What’s not changing, though, is our deep specialization and domain knowledge. Researchers are still needed to shed light on what type of research is relevant for the questions you’re asking. Designers are still designing the screens and the actual UX. But AI is changing everything, so who knows what will happen there. It’s important to know where our craft expertise remains. I don’t think designers have turned into researchers; I think they’ve just gained research skills. 

Tessa: What emerging trends in design do you believe will significantly impact the industry in the next few years? 

Sarah: AI-assisted design is obviously huge. I’m interested in how that might shift us into more systems thinking in design. We will soon be able to output screens with these tools, and I think we really need to start thinking more like systems designers and see how the whole ecosystem of interactions works. 

I also think we’re going to have to get back to the basics of behavioral design. Maybe we all need to get psychology degrees. We are being thrown for a loop in terms of what motivates people in an AI-driven world, what habit formations will exist when everything is moving so fast, and what success looks like for users. 

Finally, responsible design. There are big questions designers will need to answer for, and we need to be accountable for how we’re genuinely improving people’s lives and productivity, not just shipping something because we can. That will be a big challenge because we are often not the business owners, so the question is, how do we bring our business owners alongside us in thinking this way?

Want to hear more from Sarah Karp? At Insight Out 2025, Sarah Karp broke down the tough reality of today’s resource-strapped teams—and how constraints can actually drive better outcomes across research, design, and engineering. Watch the full talk on our YouTube channel.