By the early 2000s our Customer Experience Design team at Agilisys was running some of the earliest web usability labs in the country. Parents from McDonald’s focus groups worked through prototypes with their children under eye tracking, while analysts and testers watched from the other side of the glass. It was simply the only way to find out whether a thing worked.
None of that has changed. The stakes have. AI can produce an interface, a flow and the copy inside it in minutes, which makes building cheap and judgement expensive. It will happily generate a hundred confident-looking options that have never met a user.
So every decision is still grounded in real understanding of the people who will use it, not in assumption, preference, or convention. That is what produces digital products that work and businesses that grow.