The Values of Value in AI Adoption: Rethinking Efficiency in UX Designers' Workplaces

Paper Title

The Values of Value in AI Adoption: Rethinking Efficiency in UX Designers' Workplaces

Publication Info

• Topic area: AI adoption in UX design and its implications on efficiency, values, and organizational dynamics.
• Keywords: AI adoption, UX design, efficiency, organizational culture, team dynamics, professional identity, sociotechnical systems, worker agency, value negotiation, compliance.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: AI adoption in UX workplaces is often framed around efficiency and productivity, but this framing overlooks the social, ethical, and relational dimensions of value. Prior research has not sufficiently addressed how AI adoption reshapes roles, relationships, and power dynamics across individual, team, and organizational levels.
• Significance: Understanding AI adoption as a negotiation of values is critical for ensuring that it supports worker agency, professional identity, and collaborative practices rather than undermining them. This has implications for the long-term sustainability of AI in creative and organizational contexts.
• Motivation and related work: Previous studies in HCI and CSCW have explored the technical and usability aspects of AI tools but have paid less attention to the broader social and organizational dynamics of adoption. This paper builds on critiques of efficiency-driven paradigms and examines AI adoption as a contested process shaped by competing values and power structures.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The study investigates AI adoption in UX design through a multi-scalar lens, focusing on individual, team, and organizational levels. It employs design workshops and follow-up interviews with 15 UX professionals to explore how AI adoption is deliberated and negotiated in practice.
• Novelty:
  1. Conceptualizes AI adoption as a negotiation of values rather than a purely technical or economic decision.
  2. Examines how AI adoption reshapes roles, responsibilities, and relationships across individual, team, and organizational scales.
  3. Highlights the hidden labor and emotional tolls associated with AI adoption, challenging the notion of efficiency as a neutral or unqualified good.
  4. Proposes future research directions to strengthen worker agency and align AI adoption with social and organizational values.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted virtual design workshops with 15 UX professionals from diverse sectors (finance, IT, healthcare, consulting, etc.).
  • Used scenario-building and critical questioning activities to explore AI adoption dynamics.
  • Followed up with semi-structured interviews to capture individual reflections.
  • Analyzed data using reflexive thematic analysis to identify key themes and insights.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • AI adoption is shaped by efficiency goals but introduces tensions around professional worth, skill development, and hidden labor.
  • At the team level, AI reshapes collaboration, responsibility, and communication norms, often creating emotional burdens and role-specific anxieties.
  • Organizational adoption is constrained by compliance, leadership priorities, and cultural norms, often sidelining practitioners' needs.
• Advantage over baselines: The study moves beyond task-level evaluations of AI tools to provide a nuanced understanding of how adoption unfolds across social and organizational contexts, highlighting the interplay between economic and social values.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Workshops and interviews revealed how designers deliberate on AI adoption, surfacing hidden labor, ethical concerns, and relational dynamics.
  • Participants used AI tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Figma for tasks such as transcribing, ideation, and prototyping, but faced challenges in evaluating their efficiency and impact.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The study is limited to UX professionals and may not generalize to other domains.
  • Future research should explore mechanisms to strengthen worker agency, examine the redistribution of responsibility, and address the long-term impacts of AI on professional identity and organizational politics.

Summary

This paper examines AI adoption in UX design as a multi-scalar process of negotiating values, focusing on individual, team, and organizational levels. Through workshops and interviews with 15 UX professionals, it highlights how AI reshapes roles, relationships, and power dynamics, challenging traditional notions of efficiency. The findings reveal that AI adoption is not a neutral or purely technical decision but a contested process with significant social and ethical implications. Future research should prioritize worker agency and develop frameworks to align AI adoption with broader organizational and social values.