Tommy Geoco
Product designer, founder and host of UX Tools, the design-tools newsletter, annual survey and podcast.
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Their wordswhen I hear people say GPT 5.5 is worse than Opus 4.7 and I'm like, what does that mean? You know, like what are you comparing? Are you just saying like you one shotted a thing and that probabilistic output that you got from one verse the other on that given day was better or worse? Cuz that's not a very good way to evaluate it.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 1st of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsI don't think there's the future where we're going from tool to tool and reinventing that over and over. All the hours spent just like screwing in our intent the correct way is going to become just a briefcase you carry from one tool to the other.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 2nd of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsI think the general purpose tool might have a place eventually. I don't think that's the right answer right now. Maybe I won't just like outright say it's not the right answer, but it's not interesting to me.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 3rd of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsif you think like sort of primitives, you have canvas, I canvases I think are always going to have a place in this workflow.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 4th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsSo, so you need like an interface surface area. You need where the work lives surface area. You need a canvas for more deterministic work. And you need your agent or your like interface for coding for more probabilistic work.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 5th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsI still think Figma is in the game. A lot of even a lot of these like agentic teams that are like super forward-thinking, like they're using Figma a lot still.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 6th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordswhen we started installing like assembly lines and stuff, people came in early and just like tried to install new equipment on top of of old factory workflows and it didn't work, right? Until Ford came out and said, "No, we got to like rearrange the entire factory." A version of that has to happen right now.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 7th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsI think the number one is that the company is making room for the experimentation and it's expensive. It's expensive in token cost. It's expensive in cuz you go down rabbit holes that like are throwaway work a lot.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 8th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd that's why I put the onus on like the leadership to be like, "Hey, you have to make time.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 9th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsBut I also will say this is still really early. It is accelerating pretty quickly, but if you hear us yapping about this and you're like this is really overwhelming, this makes me have a whole bunch of FOMO. You like you are fine to wait. I really think you can wait at the moment for some of this, especially all this agentic stuff
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 10th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsBut you can do more. It's like you have more time, you have more ability. Like you stack more things inside of that open space, compensation should increase.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 11th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsit's just like being able to build intent and zoom in and out. Like the ability to move between altitudes, not just of like product thinking and then like the interaction moment, but also from workflows.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 12th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordstune out the noise for a second and think of something that you have as like a problem. And and like a problem every designer has is the blank canvas problem. It's the Hello World project, I think, to get you into this stuff.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 13th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordscompare compare workflows, compare shapes. Because we will eventually converge around some better practices around this stuff, but we don't know what that is yet.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 14th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsthe absolute best way to find yourself being leaned on that way is to do something that Brandon Engineer did at Vercel. Find a cross-functional use case where design is needed by marketing for a task that like you don't have time for, you don't want to spend time on and build an internal tool.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 15th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsit happens just like anything else happens with a product. It's useful, someone tries it, and then it starts to spread
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 16th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsI do still think don't go 100 miles an hour. You probably go like 60 miles an hour. Like let's go the speed limit and let's pay attention to like what we're seeing as we get there.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 17th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsthe biggest thing you can do is to go in and to try and help cross-functional people do more design work easily. Like parts of the process. Enable your marketing team to create that blog image without needing you, right? Like create a design function that is enabling cross-functional partners. I truly don't think you're going to cannibalize yourself.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 18th of 21 in this recording
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Our reading
AI fluency will eventually become an ambient thing, though it is important language right now.
Their wordsAnd I think like AI fluency is going to eventually just become like an ambient thing. I don't think we're going to like highlight that language forever. But I think right now it is important language cuz a lot of companies are like yeah, we want this designer who can come in and think.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 19th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsshow me your workflow. Show me how you design something, you know, take me through an idea that you've created and and that is something that I want to know. I want to watch and pick apart and ask why and see which tools are involved in that.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 20th of 21 in this recording
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Their wordsI really think the future belongs to builders. There's like something I said the other day which was like I think the future is bright, but it has to be built.
↗Tommy Geoco - The state of the design industry right nowyoutube.com 21st of 21 in this recording