AI is waking up and shaking things up. It’s going to change how we will design in the future.

But don’t just run off now. Because you can’t just grab some tools and start playing with AI. You need to change your mindset, find out what makes sense to use AI for, and bring your users along for the ride. To get ready for this adventure, but also to remember that we have a responsibility as designers, I can recommend the AI’s Principles for UX, written down by Lennart Ziburski: The UX of AI. Design AI with users for mutual empowerment.

Today AI is strongly referred to ChatGPT. It is important to know that this is initially and primarily a chat application based on a so-called LLM (Large Langue Model). LLMs are a type of neural networks that are trained on large amounts of unlabelled text using self-supervised learning. Large language model – Wikipedia

That sounds pretty boring. Just text stuff? What does that have to do with design? Well, AI can do a lot more than just write and talk. It can also help with all kinds of UX design tasks, beyond text and dialogue. AI is basically when machines or computer systems can do things that usually need human smarts, like thinking, learning, making choices, etc.

AI Powered UX Design

AI can also perform tasks that involve images, audio, video, speech, games, robotics, and many other domains. Sounds more like the fun parts of the designer’s job, right? Or it can for example make sense of user data quickly and easily. This can help designers find ways to improve their designs in a data-driven way. And there will be many more opportunities to make our everyday work a little easier.

Ideas for meaningful use cases

So how can AI help us evolve our design process and take away time-consuming busywork? For the beginning let’s focus on only two but yet very fertile fields.

Support User Research and Testing

• Data analysis: Look at tons of user data and find out what’s going on. This can inform design decisions, help to uncover optimization potential or assist designers to create more personalized user experiences.
• User feedback: A key qualification for UX designers is to listen to what users say, feel and mean. This can help designers know what users really need and which real problems have to be solved. AI can take over the part of transcribing user interviews, summarizing the results, evaluating the feedback and making suggestions for improvements.
• A/B testing automation: Quickly generating and testing multiple variations of a design. This assists designers in identifying the most effective version and support data-driven decisions.

Speed up design workflows

• Create flowcharts or quick drafts from sketches: Provide a solid foundation for designers to move forward
• Quickly visualize ideas: Create visual assets like illustrations for conceptual work in no time. No more need to put boxy “image here” placeholders into your design drafts.
• Write and revise copy: Support for quickly adding meaning to your design drafts beyond lorem ipsum.

As helper for visualization or text editing there for example already exist AI plugins to use with Figma.

The key benefits for UX designers lie in speeding up their workflows and allowing for more focus on problem solving and (creative) ideation.

There are so many things you can do with AI that you might feel lost. That’s why I’ve gathered some fresh and useful resources to help you get going right away.

Resources to get started in UX with AI

• Navigating the Future of Design in the Age of AI: How designers can leverage AI to create more human-centered and ethical solutions.
• How to Use Chat GPT in Your Design Process: 11 Advanced UX Tasks: How ChatGPT can help UX designers improve their communication skills, empathy, and creativity.
• 10 Ways Businesses Are Using ChatGPT: How businesses can use ChatGPT to enhance their customer service, marketing, sales, and internal communication.
• Using ChatGPT for User Research: How to use ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot, to conduct user interviews and surveys.
• Say Goodbye to ChatGPT. Here Are New AI Tools That Will Blow Your Mind: A list of some of the most impressive and innovative AI tools that are changing the game for content creation, design, and more.
• 30+ AI tools you can try for free: A collection of free AI tools that can help you with tasks such as writing, designing, editing, analyzing, and more.
• NVIDIA Canvas: transform your simple sketches into realistic landscapes. Make backgrounds in a snap, or explore concepts faster and have more time to bring your ideas to life.
• Midjourney – The easiest way to get feedback on your designs: A tool that lets you create and share your designs with real users and get instant feedback via ChatGPT.
• DALL·E – Creating Images from Text: An AI system that can generate images from any text description. You can also manipulate the images by adding or removing keywords.

Are you already on board with this? What experiences do you have to share?