UX is shifting. What does that mean for us? An interview with Shift UX curator, Abby Covert

Abby Covert is an information architect, writer, and community organizer who specializes in helping people make sense of messes. She has written three books on sensemaking: How to Make Sense of Any Mess (2014), Stuck? Diagrams Help. (2022), and Timeless Sensemaking for Modern Sensemakers (2026). In 2020, she left a 20-year consulting career to focus on independent publishing and community building. Today, she joins us as one of the curators of the upcoming Shift UX conference, taking place live in New York City and online this September 23-25, 2026. We sat down to ask her about the shift that’s happening in user experience (UX), and what that means for the rest of us.

Why is Shift UX needed now?

Shift UX is needed right now because people are scared. People are experiencing the shift that is happening all throughout UX and the industries that it touches, but we’re not collectively given a place and a space to deal with that…There’s a level of grief that we need to deal with that’s probably best done in a community.

Some people think that UX is dead. Do you think it really has a future?

User experience is not dead. That’s so silly. I feel like user experience existed before we branded it, and it’s going to exist far after we decide that it’s not called that anymore.

The skills within UX and the people who have invested time in deeply understanding user-centered thinking and human-centered design…those people will always have work.

Why speak on your particular pillar?

Sense-making is just the thing that runs through all of it, you know? It’s like, you can’t get anything done with more than one person without having to add that layer of making sense on top of it.

In the process of understanding how we’re addressing the shift is understanding that sense-making is something we have to weave throughout the whole thing in order to be able to wrangle it at all.

It’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to messes, but man, we’re going to need new skills to figure out: what do we do now? The thing that is shifting is having an increased need for things like discernment. We have the ability to do anything we want, and we have all of the tools we’ve ever asked for. But now we have to pick. We can’t fix all of it—we don’t have the energy or the time or the people—so how we decide what goes first, next, and last is a big focus of the sensemaking community.

Can you speak on your background and how it relates to systems-level thinking?

I’ve been an information architect for more than 20 years, and so I’ve moved through a lot of different periods of technology and change. With that, what I’ve seen is that we have to have a basic set of sense-making skills to get through whatever the brunt force of the chaos is that’s coming at us. So I’ve kind of made that my collective charge to do.

What does a conference look like in this shift, and how do we serve people with so much ambiguity? These speakers don’t have all the answers and aren’t going to pretend like they do. So how do we make that a really productive exercise for everybody and also start to build a community of all of these different silos that have started to form as we’ve fractured as a community as a whole?

Why should someone attend Shift UX?

Lou Rosenfeld has been at the center of every shift that we’ve experienced as a community for 30-plus years. So I want to be a part of this conference because of that. I think that if there’s going to be a room that really makes an impact on the questions that we’re laying out for the community, I think it’s going to be a room that Lou has curated.

We really are at a nexus of a shift. [Shift UX] is going to be the room that admits it and starts to work through it collectively with some of the people that we haven’t mixed together in a long while, if ever.

What worries you if the field doesn’t make this shift well?

The underfunding of user experience that’s happened just in the last 5 years has absolutely increased the, as Cory Doctorow puts it, enshittification, um, of the world. So, yeah, I mean, I think that the circumstance is actually pretty dire. If we can’t move through this collectively, it means we have to move through it alone, and I think that’s gonna be harder. We all have a collective incentive to move through it, but whether or not we do it together or alone, I think is really the question that we’re asking.

On the flip side, what does the shift going well mean for you and for all the practitioners out there?

How we’ll know that it has shifted as opposed to we are shifting is when everybody can go back to work and feel like they know what they’re doing again. There were a couple of years there where we knew what we were doing. We knew what our value was. People were hiring us. People in school wanted to grow up to be us. None of that is really true anymore. It’s definitely something that I think we will absolutely know when we’re through, and I hope it’s very soon.

Any final thoughts on why UXers should attend Shift UX?

We’re going to do some really excellent experiments in what it means to engage an audience this large in wading through a topic this big. So for what it’s worth, I think that we’re going to be trying some things from a sense-making standpoint that are worth being part of.

If that intrigues you at all, come on through.