For years, user experience was treated as a layer.
The business decided what it wanted to do. Technology figured out how to make it work. Then UX arrived to make the screens clearer, the buttons easier to find and the journey slightly less painful.
That definition is now obsolete.
In a company the size of Target, experience is not something applied to the business after the important decisions have been made. Experience is the cumulative result of those decisions. It is the app, the store, the curbside pickup lane, the inventory system, the distribution center and the tools used by the people unloading trucks or stocking shelves.
The interface is only the part the customer can see.
That was the larger point running through my recent conversation with Purvi Shah, Senior Vice President, User Experience at Target. Her remit includes both guest-facing experiences and the internal systems used by a workforce numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
That distinction matters.
A retailer cannot create a genuinely simple customer experience on top of an operational system that is fragmented, confusing or unreliable. The frustration may surface in the app or at the pickup counter, but it was often created much earlier – inside a merchandising workflow, a fulfillment process, an inventory decision or an employee tool.
The customer experiences the entire operating model, whether the company intends them to or not.
UX Is No Longer a Department
The phrase “user experience” still sounds like a design function. In practice, it is becoming an enterprise discipline.
The work begins with understanding what people are actually trying to accomplish, under the conditions in which they are trying to accomplish it. Not an abstract customer journey. A real person, in a real place, with limited time, incomplete information and competing pressures.
That could mean a parent collecting an order between school pickup and dinner. It could mean an employee trying to locate merchandise in a crowded backroom. It could mean a supply-chain worker making hundreds of decisions during a shift.
Those environments are not edge cases. They are the experience.
This is why serious UX work cannot be confined to a design studio or evaluated only through a dashboard. Target’s teams prototype and test in the places where the work and shopping actually happen: stores, distribution centers, offices and pickup lanes.
That sounds obvious. It isn’t.
Large companies are extremely good at designing for the way their systems are supposed to work. Human-centered design forces them to confront the way people actually behave when those systems meet reality.
That gap is where most bad experiences live.
It is also where UX becomes strategically valuable. The discipline is not merely identifying whether someone can complete a task. It is uncovering the operational decisions, organizational assumptions and technology constraints that made the task difficult in the first place.
Done properly, UX is not decorating the enterprise. It is diagnosing it.
The Next Interface May Not Belong to the Retailer
Generative AI and agentic commerce make this shift even more consequential.
Retailers have spent decades trying to own the customer interface. They built stores, websites and mobile apps. They invested heavily in creating destinations where customers could search, browse, compare and buy.
But product discovery is increasingly happening somewhere else.
Consumers are finding products through social platforms, search engines and AI assistants. Over time, some of those systems will not simply recommend what to buy. They will compare products, assemble carts, apply preferences and potentially complete transactions on the customer’s behalf.
That means a growing share of the shopping experience may take place outside the retailer’s controlled environment.
For retail brands, this creates an uncomfortable strategic question: What happens when your interface is no longer the primary interface?
The instinctive answer is to protect the destination. Try to keep the customer inside the app, the website or the branded ecosystem.
The more realistic answer is to make the brand useful wherever the customer chooses to operate.
Target’s work with major AI platforms points toward that future. The objective is not simply to distribute product information into another channel. It is to begin defining how a retailer should function inside an environment in which the shopping journey is being mediated by someone else’s intelligence.
That turns UX into something broader than interaction design.
It becomes protocol design.
What information should an AI system be allowed to access? How should inventory, pricing and availability be represented? How are customer preferences communicated? How can a recommendation be explained? Where does the retailer retain control? Where does the consumer?
These decisions will shape commerce just as surely as the design of the website once did.
The companies experimenting now are not simply trying new interfaces. They are helping establish the rules under which future shopping will happen.
Convenience Is Not the Same as Permission
The industry’s current AI narrative is dominated by efficiency.
AI will reduce search. It will anticipate needs. It will remove steps. It will make commerce faster, easier and more personalized.
All of that is probably true.
It is also an incomplete definition of a good experience.
Consider a system that recognizes a customer buys bananas every week. Recommending bananas may be useful. Automatically adding them to the cart is something else entirely.
The behavioral signal is the same. The experience is not.
One reduces effort. The other assumes authority.
That distinction will become increasingly important as commerce systems move from suggesting to acting. The question is no longer merely whether the AI correctly predicted what the customer wanted. The question is whether it had permission to do anything about it.
This is where trust becomes less of a brand value and more of a system requirement.
Customers will need to understand why something was recommended, what information produced the recommendation and what the system intends to do next. They will need a meaningful opportunity to intervene, correct or reverse the decision.
The more autonomous the system becomes, the more visible its logic may need to be.
That presents a challenge for companies accustomed to treating personalization as something that happens quietly in the background. In agentic commerce, invisible intelligence can quickly feel like invisible manipulation.
The winning systems will not simply know more about the customer. They will be better at showing restraint.
The Best Experience Is Not Always the Fastest One
There is another danger in reducing UX to friction removal.
Shopping is not always a utilitarian task. Sometimes people want efficiency. Sometimes they want discovery. Sometimes they want reassurance, inspiration or the small pleasure of finding something they had not expected.
AI systems will be very good at compressing journeys. But compression is not always improvement.
A curbside pickup experience can remove an hour of inconvenience from a parent’s day. That is meaningful. It can create a moment of relief that feels almost disproportionate to the transaction itself.
But the same customer may also enjoy walking through a store, discovering a product or changing their mind.
Good UX does not impose a single definition of convenience. It recognizes that people move between modes.
This is why the future of retail experience cannot be built solely around eliminating steps. The objective should be to remove the effort people resent while preserving the parts they value.
That requires a much richer understanding of the customer than conversion data alone can provide.
Experience Is the Business
The larger lesson from Target is that UX is becoming inseparable from enterprise performance.
It affects whether employees can do their jobs, whether inventory information can be trusted, whether fulfillment promises can be kept and whether AI-powered experiences feel helpful or invasive.
That makes UX a leadership issue.
It requires design, technology, operations, merchandising, data, legal and the business to work from a shared understanding of the human outcome they are trying to create. No single function can absorb all of that complexity, and no interface can conceal the failures indefinitely.
Companies still treating UX as a downstream design activity will keep polishing symptoms.
The more advanced organizations are using it to interrogate the system itself.
And as commerce moves beyond branded screens and into AI-mediated environments, that capability becomes even more important. The experience will be distributed across platforms, technologies, physical locations and autonomous agents.
The brand will no longer control every interaction.
But it will still be accountable for the result.
My full conversation with Purvi Shah of Target explores how one of the world’s largest retailers is thinking about human-centered design, enterprise collaboration, experimentation and trust as AI begins to reshape the shopping journey.
