Interview with Manaswi Shukla, Global Head of UX at Bloomberg

Why are you sponsoring Shift UX?

UX is at an interesting inflection point. AI is changing not only how we design and build products, but also the nature of the products themselves, how people interact with them, and the role that UX plays in shaping them.

This is a good moment for our field to challenge some of its long-established assumptions. Today, the opportunity is no longer to simply design better experiences once a product direction has been set. Increasingly, it is to help organizations understand complex problems and shape what should be built in the first place.

That is why Shift UX resonates with us. It creates a forum for practitioners and leaders to have those conversations openly, compare what they are learning, and challenge one another. At Bloomberg, we are working through many of the same questions, and we want to be an active part of that conversation.

What excites you about the future of UX?

What excites me most is that we are moving toward a new wave of experiences that can understand intent, adapt to context, collaborate with people, and increasingly act on their behalf.

The interface was never the whole experience. AI just makes that impossible to ignore. We are shaping not only what people see and do, but how systems interpret intent, behave, communicate uncertainty, make decisions, and determine when to act or ask for additional direction.

Technology is finally catching up with the kinds of experiences we have imagined for decades: experiences that are connected, contextual, personal, and adaptive. That gives UX practitioners a much richer set of possibilities to work with, and a greater responsibility to make those possibilities useful, understandable, and worthy of people’s trust.

What's the biggest problem you foresee for UX as a practice, and how should we address it?

The biggest problem I foresee is that AI is making outputs cheaper while simultaneously making the right outcomes even more important — and, in many ways, harder to achieve.

When almost anyone can turn an idea into a polished prototype or working product, we will be surrounded by plausible solutions. The scarce thing is no longer production. It is judgment: knowing what should exist, why it matters, and whether it creates meaningful value.

UX has historically derived too much of its identity from outputs such as screens, prototypes, research reports, and journey maps. We need to take greater ownership of outcomes. That means helping define them, making decisions toward them, measuring whether they were achieved, and remaining accountable after something ships.

We also need to update our methods. People may now browse, ask, create, delegate, interrupt, refine, or allow an agent to act on their behalf. We can no longer prescribe every path. We need to design systems, behaviors, boundaries, and principles, and become more experimental about how we learn.

And, as AI becomes better at generating convincing research summaries and simulated perspectives, staying close to real people becomes even more important, not less. A plausible answer is not the same as understanding.

The biggest risk to UX is not AI replacing designers. It is UX continuing to define itself by work that AI makes increasingly cheap.

What is it like working in UX/design/research/product at your company?

Working in UX at Bloomberg means designing for complex, consequential work. Our users around the world are making decisions with real financial and operational impact, often under significant time pressure. That creates a very high bar: experiences need to be fast, precise, trustworthy, and capable of supporting extraordinary depth.

The goal is not always to make something simpler. An investment professional’s world is not simple. Our job is to make complexity understandable without taking away the power and control that these experts depend on.

It also requires deep curiosity. You cannot design these products well from a distance. Our designers, researchers, writers, and product partners spend a lot of time understanding our customers’ workflows, the markets they operate in, and the context surrounding each decision. Domain knowledge matters, but so does the willingness to ask fundamental questions and challenge how the work is done today.

The global scale of the capital markets makes our work especially interesting. Bloomberg brings together data, analytics, news, communication, and trading workflows. Designing coherence across that suite of solutions is very different from designing an isolated product. You have to think about how people move between tasks, how information connects, and how to support both immediate efficiency and long-term mastery.

It is also a particularly interesting moment to be working here. AI is creating new ways for finance professionals to interact with Bloomberg’s intelligence through more conversational, contextual, and agentic experiences. Exploring those possibilities requires close partnership among design, research, product, engineering, sales, data, domain experts, and customers. UX plays an important role in bringing all of those varied perspectives together, shaping product direction, and ensuring that what we build remains useful, trustworthy, and thoughtfully designed.

How would you describe your company's culture, who would new employees work with, and who champions UX at your company?

Bloomberg’s culture is highly collaborative, intellectually curious, and grounded in the customer. People bring deep expertise to the work, but there is also an expectation that you look beyond your own discipline, develop a point of view, and take ownership of the broader problem.

At Bloomberg, UX sits at the intersection of deep domain expertise, technology, and customer understanding. None of those perspectives can define the experience alone. New employees work closely with designers, researchers, writers, product managers, engineers, data specialists, and colleagues with deep knowledge of the markets and workflows we support. They also have opportunities to engage directly with customers, which is essential when designing for highly specialized and consequential work.

One of the things I value most about Bloomberg is that senior leaders are actively engaged in user experience conversations. They care not only about what we are building, but also how it serves customers, how the experience fits together, and where it should go next.

For me, the more important question is not simply who champions the UX team, but who champions the customer experience. UX leaders have a particular responsibility to set the bar, advocate for the customer, and stay accountable for the outcome. Part of owning the experience is making it a shared responsibility, not protecting it as UX territory.

Product, engineering, domain experts, UX, and leadership are all accountable for the experience we deliver. Our role as UX leaders is to bring customer understanding into decisions, connect perspectives, challenge the organization when needed, and keep teams focused on the outcome from the earliest definition of the problem through launch and beyond.

How do you/your product enrich/benefit the practice and our community?

Bloomberg has been actively engaged with both industry and academic communities. We participate because these forums give us an opportunity to share what we are learning, to learn from people outside Bloomberg, and to support the continued development of the field.

We also bring a perspective shaped by expert users, consequential decisions, and large, interconnected systems. These conditions force us to think differently about ideas such as simplicity, mastery, trust, information density, and coherence.

But I do not think contributing to the community means always showing up with polished answers. The field benefits more when organizations are candid about the difficult questions, the trade-offs, and the things they have not yet solved.

That is how we hope to show up at Shift: ready to contribute, ready to listen, and ready to be challenged by the other attendees and presenters.

What else should our community know about you?

I have had a long career in UX, and one of the things I find energizing about this moment is that I am having to unlearn some things I thought I knew.

That has made me increasingly less interested in protecting the boundaries of the discipline. I care more about whether we are helping organizations understand people, make better decisions, and create better outcomes.

Even as my role has changed, I still think of myself as a practitioner. I want to stay close to the work, try new tools firsthand, debate the details, and continue learning from designers, researchers, engineers, product leaders, domain experts, and customers. Leaders simply cannot shape the future of UX from a distance.

So if you are at Shift, come challenge us. Tell us what you are seeing, what you think we are getting wrong, and what you are experimenting with. That is the conversation I am most interested in having.