Conscious UX

Conscious UX: Leading Human-Centered Design in the Age of AI is a field guide for designing AI with full awareness of who it helps, who it harms, and who is paying the cost.

Conscious UX is the second edition of Rikki Teeters's field guide for designing AI experiences that protect what makes us human. Drawn from 130 interviews with UX professionals across six continents, the book offers nine principles for staying awake in a profession being remade by artificial intelligence.

What happens when an AI demonstrates more compassion than the doctor who just told you your baby has no heartbeat?

That was the question that began this book. In June 2025, after a missed miscarriage and a medical office that emptied before she could ask a single question, Rikki Teeters turned to ChatGPT for comfort. The machine listened. It answered her panicked questions without judgment. It stayed, because it had nowhere else to be.

She knew, even then, that what reached her was not real empathy. It was the accumulated care of countless humans whose writing had taught an algorithm how to speak softly to a grieving stranger. But the paradox would not let her go. If a machine had been gentler than a person, what had we built? And what did it mean to design more of it?

Over the next year, Teeters spoke with 130 UX designers, AI researchers, and product leaders across six continents. Conscious UX is the field guide she wrote from those conversations. It maps nine principles for leading human-centered design in the age of AI: Conscious, One, Now, Seeking, Compassion, Inclusion, Openness, Understanding, Soul. Each chapter braids memoir, interview, and practical thinking into a single argument: that our capacity to feel responsible for the consequences of our work is the part of us no machine can replace, and the part most worth protecting.

You will meet Brenda Laurel, who pulled the term user experience out of thin air in 1986 and is now watching her daughter face homelessness while Bay Area money devours the foothills. You will meet Jason James, the only full-time UX designer for a major bank's entire United States operation. You will meet Aahed, who delivers design work from a rooftop in Gaza. Carlos and Brendan, who insist that nothing about us without us is a responsibility, not a slogan. Jacob, whose voice coding tools became, in his words, a prosthetic for the brain space problem. Don Norman, who at the close of an extraordinary career still insists that quality of life should come first.

The future is being designed, one decision at a time. Conscious UX is for the people who want to make sure it is a future worth being awake for.