The best UX lessons don’t always come from industry conferences or design textbooks. Sometimes they come from a tabletop with dice.
On a recent episode of AdLab, LP’s own UX Designer Adam Gilbert drew a straight line between Dungeons & Dragons and the principles that define effective website design. The connection is more direct than it sounds.
Both disciplines are built on the same foundation: understanding how people make decisions, and creating experiences that feel intuitive enough that users never have to think about them.
An Unconventional Path Into UX
Strong UX designers rarely arrive in a straight line. Backgrounds in writing, customer service, trades, and hands-on client work all build the kind of human-centered instincts that design school alone can’t teach.
That multidisciplinary foundation matters. Design decisions informed by real-world observation — how people actually behave, not how teams assume they will — produce better outcomes than those driven by trends or internal preference alone.
Today, UX/UI and design systems sit at the intersection of user needs and business goals. Getting that balance right takes both technical skill and genuine empathy.
Stop Railroading Your Users
In tabletop RPGs, “railroading” is what happens when the game master forces players down a predetermined path regardless of their choices. The result is predictable: frustration and disengagement.
The same dynamic plays out on websites.
Teams often design from the inside out — building flows that reflect internal assumptions about what users want rather than how users actually behave. That top-down approach creates friction. Users feel pushed rather than guided, and they leave.
Effective UX flips this. The goal isn’t to control behavior — it’s to create an environment where the right action feels natural. Structure provides confidence. Autonomy drives engagement. When users feel in control of their journey, they’re more likely to complete it.
This is especially relevant as on-site experiences grow more sophisticated. AI-powered tools like Microsoft Brand Agents are changing what “guidance” looks like on ecommerce sites — surfacing products, answering questions, and reducing decision friction in real time. The underlying UX principle stays the same: meet users where they are, and make the next step obvious.
The Best Design Goes Unnoticed
There’s a principle that holds across disciplines: when something works perfectly, it disappears.
Users don’t praise intuitive navigation. They don’t notice seamless interactions. What they notice is confusion, friction, and broken flows.
When design is doing its job, it fades into the background. Users focus on completing their task, not on figuring out how the interface works. That’s the hallmark of strong UX:
- Clear, logical navigation
- Minimal friction at every step
- Interactions that feel obvious in hindsight
Flash and novelty are tempting. Clarity converts. If you’re evaluating where your own site stands, LP’s 10-point website conversion checklist is a practical place to start.
AI Is Changing Everything — And Maybe Nothing
AI is reshaping the digital landscape faster than most teams can absorb. New tools, new capabilities, new workflows — all arriving simultaneously.
But the long-term impact on user experience is still taking shape.
Much of today’s AI innovation is driven by what the technology can do rather than what users actually need. That’s a natural early phase. Widespread adoption, though, depends on whether these tools improve the experience in ways users can feel.
The question isn’t how powerful AI becomes. It’s how effectively it solves real problems for real users.
Where AI Delivers Real Value
In design and development workflows, AI is already proving its worth — particularly for accelerating prototyping, iteration, and execution.
Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and v0 can help teams move faster and test ideas more efficiently. The key is knowing when to bring them in.
AI delivers the most value after foundational work is complete: user research, stakeholder alignment, problem definition, and requirement gathering. Once that groundwork is in place, AI accelerates. Introduced too early — before the problem is clearly defined — it produces generic outputs that reflect the ambiguity of the inputs.
In other words, AI is an amplifier. It makes strong foundations stronger. It can’t substitute for them.
Don’t Skip the Fundamentals
As AI becomes more embedded in daily workflows, the temptation to use it as a shortcut grows. That instinct is worth resisting.
Design principles, visual communication, typography, color theory, storytelling, psychology — these are the inputs that make AI outputs worth anything. The stronger the foundation, the more impactful the results.
The teams that will get the most out of AI-powered design tools are those that already understand why design decisions work, not just how to execute them.
Technology Changes. Human Nature Doesn’t
Digital tools will keep evolving. Search behavior will shift. AI will become more capable and more embedded in the experiences users expect.
But the core challenge of UX design stays constant: understand people.
The organizations that win won’t simply be the ones that adopt the latest technology. They’ll be the ones that use technology to better serve human needs — building experiences that are intuitive, empowering, and worth returning to.
Want more from Adam Gilbert on UX design, AI, and future digital experiences? Listen to the full episode on AdLab.
