Half of what we've been calling design is being automated — the wireframes, the mockups, the prototypes, the specs. That half is going, and pretending otherwise won't save it.
The other half — understanding humans, defining the problem, prioritising the tasks, providing the context — has never mattered more. It's also the half almost nobody has been spending their time on.
The whole industry is sprinting head-first into the half that's being automated.
For the last decade or two, design has been defined by its outputs. Journey maps, storyboards, wireframes, prototypes, specs — we've made thousands of them. They're the currency of the profession.
But every one of those is a definition of the solution. And before any of them can be made well, a designer needs four layers of information about the opportunity.
Who are we designing for? Demographics, psychographics — often represented as personas.
Why is that audience using this product or feature — what's their intent? And what does the business want?
What is the customer doing? What information do they need, what decision are they making — and how will we know if it went well?Touchpoint strategy
How should it be designed? Principles, design system, brand identity, positioning, technical constraints, cultural context.
Models struggle to understand real human need and to prioritise according to human desires. They can generate a hundred layouts; they cannot tell you which task matters most to a frightened person at 11pm, or that the brief you handed them is wrong.
Human designers could hold the opportunity space implicitly — in their heads, in hallway conversation, in judgement built over years. An AI model has none of that. It needs the context written down, explicitly, or it produces generic slop.
The Figma file is not your output any more. The wireframe is not your output any more. The spec is not your output any more.
Your output is the touchpoint strategy document. One per feature: the tasks that matter, force-ranked, with the emotional state behind each one and the measure that says whether it worked. Written by a human, debated by a human, refined by a human — and then handed to the machine that builds from it.
One document, per feature. It replaces the wireframe set, and it's shorter than the spec it retires. Here are five rows from a real one — a pet store product page.
I gave Claude a touchpoint strategy document for a pet store product page and said, in plain English: "Use this as a design brief." Then I asked for an alternate version and told it specifically not to use the document.
The version on the left is competent and generic. Everything on the right traces to a row of the document, and none of it was assumed or invented by the machine.
The blank document. Tasks force-ranked, emotional state, design and content approach, success criteria.
Download .docx →The pet store product page, filled in end to end. Start here — a blank template is intimidating.
Download .docx →Don't start with your whole product. Take one feature and make four short passes over it. The whole thing is an hour.
1 · Tasks. List every task the feature has to serve — the ones the user came for, and the ones the business wants. Then force-rank them into a single list. Do it on post-its: put one up, add a second and ask "more or less important than that?", then a third. No ties — the only permitted tie is the identical task appearing on both the user and business sides. That debate is the method.
2 · Emotions. For each task, write the state the person arrives in and the state they should leave in.
3 · Approach. Then how — the design and content decisions that carry each task from its arriving state to its exit state.
4 · Success criteria. Last, one measure per task: the single thing you'd watch to know it worked.
Four passes over the same short list. That's the whole document.
Sixty minutes that gives a whole team the same language for what AI actually changes about design work — where the value moves, not which tools to learn. Register your interest and I'll follow up with formats and dates.
This framework is still being built, and the corrections that have mattered all came from people running it against a real product. If something here doesn't hold up against yours, tell me.
This page was designed from its own touchpoint strategy document. Every section maps to a task and the emotional state it's meant to serve — turn the mapping on to see it, or download the full TSD.