Will AI replace Design?

I’ve been asked to give my opinion on this question many times over the last 18 months: How will Artificial Intelligence impact the future of design? I refrained from giving my opinion for one main reason: honestly, I wasn’t sure how I felt.

I considered my thoughts over time. Would AI replace Design, Product, Research, Engineering, and all the other facets of a Digital department? For a time, I thought, yeah, maybe it could. If we focus on Research and Design in isolation:

If AI is able to efficiently use best practices across Research methodologies and tooling, Experience Design, Design Systems, and Experimentation methods, could AI replace Research and Design?

Empathy and Problem Solving

Empathy and problem-solving however, are currently out of scope for AI. Humans understand each other (to some degree), and we all naturally have a passion for problem solving. Within Research and Design its our responsibility to understand customer pain points, analyse them and find opportunities that improve customer experience and drive business value.

Design folks collaborating together, applying empathy and using our vast Problem Solving methodologies is our super power, and thats exactly where we need to spend more of our time. This is where AI can come in.

So, do I think AI will replace Design? The answer is obviously no, AI won’t replace us (yet) but it comes with a caveat. As Ioana Teleanu, a seasoned AI Designer and Design Educator said; “AI won’t replace Designers but Designers who use AI will.”

Innovation is an old game

If we look back to Henry Ford, in the early 1900s he wanted to make cars for everyone, not just the wealthy. At the time cars were made by a group of mechanics, who made each part of the car individually. They came together to build the vehicle over a long period of time, because parts were made individually and bespoke, to a degree every car was unique. Some manufacturers still do this to this day, but it’ll cost you, Roll-Royce has built bespoke vehicles for a measly £30million.

Ford pivoted from the norm and utilised the Assembly Line to build for efficiency. At the time there was uproar as working on the assembly line was highly repetitive and monotonous. Workers performed the same task repeatedly, which led to boredom and a lack of job satisfaction. However, the efficiency of the Assembly Line allowed Ford to produce cars at a much faster rate, which in turn created more jobs and additionally boosted the economy. It also made Henry Ford the richest person in the world in 1922.

At the time, this innovation was scene as a threat, however the outcomes were; more jobs, a boosted economy and a change in human behaviour forever - there are 1.5 billion cars in the world today, there were 600,000 in the US in 1913 when Ford adopted the Assembly Line.

So, back to AI - where does it fit into the Design process?

The answer is everywhere. If we reflect on how we’ll use AI in our daily jobs; it will replace the mundane, repetitive, and monotonous tasks. This will enable us to focus more time on the complex, meaningful work of solving business and customer problems, similarly to how Design Systems enable designers to focus on solving UX problems rather than granular UI consistencies.

I believe using AI to enhance the design process is essential for the future of our industry.

Tips and tools

If you haven’t been able to get closer to AI for whatever reason dont worry, I didnt think I had the time to explore either. My advice would be; be curious, be exploratory and see what works for you. As Ioana said, AI won’t replace Designers but Designers who use AI will.

Below is a list of AI tools to help with your Design process, I’ve condensed the list into Five key groups;

1. Research and Customer Insights

2. UX Design Tools

3. Visual Design tools

4. UX Writing and Content

5. Product Launch-Ready

I’ve not used them all yet so I can’t give feedback on each tool but give them a try and share your experiences. Of course if you’re using these tools for your professional work be mindful of your business’ policies regarding data security etc.

1. Research and Customer Insights

Research analysis

AI tools can automate and scale your user research by combining industry expertise and tailoring suggestions to your context.

• Hotjar AI: Helps draft survey questions.
• UserTesting AI: Analyzes audience data and recruits research participants.
• Pansophic: Conducts qualitative interviews based on your product and research goals.

Data Processing

• Tableau: Provides data visualization and AI-powered data analysis.
• Microsoft Power BI: Visualizes and sorts data to find insights.
• H2O.ai: Offers an open-source platform for AI-driven data analysis.
• ChatGPT: Extracts insights from research data.

Evaluate Your Designs

• Attention Insight: Predicts where users will look and compares design effectiveness.
• Predict by Neurons: Generates predictive heatmaps and integrates with design software.
• 3M’s Visual Attention System (VAS): Extends predictive heatmaps to physical environments.
• Heurix: Conducts heuristic analysis and generates UX audit reports.
• UserTesting AI: Analyzes video, text, and behavior data to identify key insights

Market Research and Competitive Analysis

• ChatGPT: Helps with market research activities by providing a good sense of the problem space.
• The AI Toolbox for Innovators: Offers free AI tools for problem understanding, research scripts, briefs, and persona generation, though personas should be based on user research.
• DALL-E 3: Generates persona images.
• Miro AI: Transforms complex ideas into structured models like user stories and technical diagrams.

2. UX Design Tools

Design thinking and Problem solving

• IBM Watson: Provides AI-driven solutions for various sectors, including healthcare and business analytics.
• Google Cloud AI: Offers AI tools for natural language processing, computer vision, and machine learning.
• OpenAI's GPT: Generates human-like text for a wide range of problem-solving applications.
• The AI Toolbox for Innovators: Generates problem statements for target audiences

Tools for Personas

• DALL-E 3: Creates images for personas.
• ChatGPT: Used for generating personas.
• Poll the People: Conducts consumer research with human panelists and analyzes responses using AI.
• The AI Toolbox for Innovators: Generates personas for free
• User Persona: Generates user personas based on product descriptions.

Prototyping and Wireframes

• WireGen: Figma plugin that generates editable wireframes from text descriptions.
• Visily: Transforms sketches, screenshots, or text prompts into editable wireframes and prototypes.
• Typper: Offers design suggestions to improve layout and accessibility, generating text, icons, and images from prompts.

If you need to automate repetitive tasks in your process

• Sembly AI: Generates meeting notes and summaries, integrating with task management tools.
• Otter.ai: Offers live meeting transcriptions and summaries.
• Reclaim AI: Automates scheduling for meetings, tasks, habits, and breaks.
• Ellie: Drafts intelligent emails, learning from your writing style.
• Taskade: Provides workflow automation and visualization, with pre-built checklists for design tasks.

3. Visual Design tools

UI Design

• Uizard: Generates interfaces from text prompts and hand-drawn sketches, offering templates and UI components.
• Galileo AI: Creates high-fidelity UI designs from text descriptions, integrating with Figma
• Need Inspiration for Icons or Logos? AI icon generators like IconlabAI, CandyIcons, and Diffusion Logo Studio create unique logos and app icons, serving as either final assets or starting points for further customization.
• For Stock Imagery check out AI image generators like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL·E 3 create custom images from text prompts for marketing and persona needs.
• Color Palettes, AI tools like Khroma, ColorMagic, and Chroma AI generate color palettes based on your preferences, keywords, or random phrases.

4. UX Writing and Content

AI writing assistants help with digital marketing, content creation, and microcopy.

• Notion AI: Brainstorms ideas, creates outlines, summarizes notes, and edits voice and tone.
• Grammarly: Provides writing assistance and revision suggestions.
• Writesonic, Jasper, and Copy.ai: Generate SEO-optimized long-form content.
• ChatGPT: Provides microcopy suggestions.
• Riter App: Generates microcopy based on a brief.
• Frontitude UX Writing Assistant: Figma plugin that suggests copy and alternatives based on product and user information.

5. Product Launch-Ready

AI tools automate the creation of marketing assets and presentation slides.

• Tome, Beautiful.ai, and Slides AI: Help create presentation slides.
• Canva and Midjourney: Create marketing assets in various resolutions.
• Stockimg.ai: Provides AI-generated images for design and marketing.
• MarketingBlocks: Creates landing pages, ads, videos, and long-form content.
• Motionshift: AI-powered video editing tool that creates videos from website data and visual assets.
• Pitches.ai: Enhances pitch decks with AI and expert advice.

If you’d like to learn more about AI and Design, check out this Interaction Design Foundation course here.