We’re all experiencing an AI-driven revolution. As a person overseeing the work of 70+ designers, I’m bound to be curious about new tools and what they bring to the table. Let’s take a closer look at what AI can do in the product design space. 

Short answer? Speed of ideation. If you have a creative engine running on unlimited fuel, what do you do? You use it!

Product designers, just like any other professionals who rely heavily on imagination, now have a chance to accelerate their ideation process, to bounce ideas off intelligent tools, and see how this new, collective power redefines creativity.

Take a look at four areas in which AI yields promising results:

#1 Generating design systems, style guides, images and illustrations.

• Mix’n’match: AI algorithms can analyze color palettes and create brand new combinations. Check out a sample palette generated by Huemint.

Source: Huemint.com

• Instant images: Shutterstock released their own AI image generator. Here’s a sample illustration generated for the prompt, “create an illustration for a wealth management application onboarding”. Getty Images collaborates with Nvidia, while Adobe just announced the Firefly suite. The speed of acceleration in this area is mind boggling.

Source: Nvidia.com

• Working side-by-side: Wand.app allows designers to fill parts of their sketches with AI-generated graphics from Stable Diffusion, a deep learning, text-to-image model released in 2022.

• Image generation directly in Photoshop: Auto-Photoshop-StableDiffusion-Plugin is a Photoshop plugin from Stable Diffusion API that lets graphic designers leverage image generation within their number-one tool, and with full control over the final effects. This demo shows just how interesting the new workflow can be. 

• Simple 3D animation: Check out Midjourney! Here’s a tutorial.

#2 Creating layouts and user interfaces

• Accelerated design: Uizard.io helps create website and app templates. What’s more, it can transform a mere sketch or a screenshot into a complete design. How’s that?
• We all love templates: Ask Midjourney to create an app template. Below is what it made from the simple prompt, “imagine high-quality UI design, food delivery mobile app, trending on Dribbble, Behance”.

Source: Uxplanet.org

#3 Enhancing usability testing

Designing software is one thing, but making sure it’s exactly what users need is another. AI models can be used to simulate user behavior, analyze user feedback, and identify common themes or issues. Example? Describe your project to ChatGPT and ask it to create realistic user scenarios.

#4 Democratizing design for delight

Incorporating animations and microinteractions into the interface can elevate the user experience. However, at the moment, creating them is time-consuming and few companies can afford it. AI could open ‘design for delight’ to all, making it accessible for smaller organizations.

So, away with human design?

I don’t think the tools above will replace designers. What will happen, though, is that creatives will have to adapt and learn to use the new suite to accelerate their daily work.

And when it comes to adoption at scale:

• I expect that solutions which generate almost complete designs will be more popular among smaller companies.
• Larger projects will be enhanced with tools which can integrate AI with the design suite and allow creatives to manually improve the results.
• Without a doubt, the last organizations to adapt will be enterprises, with their legal departments, complex processes, and legacy toolsets. 

Where do I see the greatest challenges? Apart from the pace of adoption, copyright issues, and “generative theft”,we might witness a wave of lawsuits (with hard to predict rulings, since proper regulation in this area must catch up).

If you’re wondering how your organization can implement AI here and now, reach out to me and I’ll be happy to connect you with our Data Science team.

Best regards,

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.