AI is changing the world as we know it at the speed of light. This includes revolutionizing User Experience (UX) design. As UX designers continue to work on creating smooth, intuitive and engaging digital experiences, AI has brought in new possibilities and changed how we approach design.
At its core, AI refers to the development of intelligent machines that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. The biggest change happening right now is in generative AI—AI that can create new content.
What is generative AI for UX Designers?
In terms of UX Design, AI can now create UI screens, generate research interview guides, and create illustrations that just weren’t possible in the past. A recent survey by Adobe found that 62% of UX designers already use AI to automate repetitive tasks and improve productivity.
This article dives into the universe of AI UX design and maps out how this powerful technology is remaking the UX industry.
Okay, let’s jump straight to the question on your mind.
Can AI do UX design?
We’ve tested multiple platforms that claim to be able to do AI UX design and the answer is: not yet. AI is useful for automating specific steps in your design workflow, but it’s not able to take on a complete design task (e.g., generate a UI) and create a high quality output, yet.
As an example, this is what happened when we gave Galileo a prompt to create a website UI.
Prompt we gave to Galileo
Output provided by Galileo
So, is AI taking over UI design?
Not yet. AI isn’t great at creating designs (Figma templates are better at the moment). Having said that, there are significant ways to use AI in speeding up your UX work.
Let’s dig in to how.
How to use AI in UX Design
Here are 4 ways you can use AI for UX Design:
- Automate repetitive tasks
- Analyze large amounts of data
- Enable personalization of UI
- Assist with rapid prototyping
Let’s dig into each of these ways AI can be useful for UX Designers:
- Automate repetitive tasks
AI can automate repetitive, time-consuming tasks like image generation, running accessibility checks, or standardizing padding on screens.
This frees up UX designers to focus on higher-level strategic and creative work, optimizing their productivity.
- Analyze large amounts of data
AI algorithms can analyze large amounts of user data very, very quickly.
No, we don’t recommend pasting your research data into ChatGPT and asking for answers—you can’t easily check its work, and frankly it probably won’t give you the insights you care about anyway. This is handing over too much control to AI.
We do recommend using AI-tools like Looppanel that act like research assistants and help you analyze your data 10x faster with automatic quality checks in place. These tools help you discover valuable insights much faster, without the tedious, manual parts of the work.
- Enable personalization of UI
Some folks are talking about how AI will be used to create dynamic, personalized designs in the future (GenUI). While this is still a work in progress, in theory AI can help UX designers adapt designs rapidly depending on the use case a user has.
This level of personalization can lead to increased user engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty, as the experience is tailored to individual needs and preferences.
- Assist with rapid prototyping
A lot of work is being done in this space—AI-powered tools are starting to generate design variations, layouts, and interactive prototypes based on input parameters and design principles.
This rapid prototyping capability allows UX designers to explore more options, iterate faster, and validate concepts quickly.
While AI offers many benefits, it's important to use it judiciously and at the right stages of the UX design process. Here are some examples of how to use AI in UX Design:
- Use AI for UX Design tasks involving large datasets of support tickets or app reviews.
- Leverage AI to generate ideas and variations, but always apply human judgment and creativity to refine and select the best solutions.
- Use AI to create notes and tag data in user research but make sure that human UXers provide context and interpret the findings.
- Implement AI-powered personalization and recommendations when there is sufficient user data to make accurate predictions.
AI is a tool that enhances the work of UX designers, but it cannot replace the human touch, empathy, and critical thinking that designers bring to the table. By striking the right balance between AI automation and human expertise, UX designers can create even more impactful and delightful user experiences that drive customer satisfaction and loyalty.
We’ll talk about the quality of these tools shortly!
What AI Cannot Do for UX Designers
While AI is a very useful tool, it definitely can’t do everything. Here are 4 key limitations of using AI in UX Design:
- Replace human creativity and empathy
While AI can assist with various tasks, it cannot replicate the unique creativity, empathy, and critical thinking that human UX designers bring to the table.
UX design requires a deep understanding of user needs, emotions, and motivations, which AI may struggle to fully grasp without human guidance.
Aka do NOT outsource talking to your users to AI. Also don’t replace users with AI.
- Solve complex problems independently
AI is a powerful tool, but it still relies on human input, context, and direction to tackle complex UX challenges effectively.
UX designers play a crucial role in defining problems, setting goals, and making strategic decisions that AI cannot handle autonomously.
- Eliminate the need for human oversight
AI systems can be subject to biases based on the data they are trained on, requiring human oversight to ensure fairness and inclusivity. They also often just don’t know what you want or need for your specific use case or persona.
While AI output can automate specific steps, it isn’t able to get you trustworthy, high quality output for an end-to-end task like building a UI without human feedback—at least yet.
- Provide the final say in design decisions
While AI can offer valuable suggestions and insights, it cannot replace the role of UX designers in making final design decisions.
UX designers need to consider a wide range of factors, including user feedback, business objectives, and technical constraints, to determine the best course of action. AI doesn’t have all this context and isn’t the best at complex, strategic decision-making.
The UX industry is undergoing a shift as artificial intelligence empowers user experience designers, simplifies processes and encourages data-driven decision making. Nonetheless, it is vital to understand AI’s limitations and the critical part played by human UX designers in advancing innovation, empathy, and critical thinking.
Is there any AI tool for UI/UX design?
The short answer: yes, and more seem to pop up everyday.
You can use AI in UX design for 4 key use-cases:
- UX research planning & analysis
- Designing & enhancing UI elements
- Writing and improving UX Copy
- Brainstorming & Ideation
And many more we won’t dive into today!
With so many AI tools out there, it can be tough to know which ones are worth using and how to use them efficiently. Here are some of the best AI tools for UX designers, along with what they do and how much they cost.
User research planning
1. ChatGPT or Claude.ai
Use Case: Planning research
Price: Start for Free. Smarter models for $20 / month
How to Use It: Use ChatGPT or Claude to prep for your research. Generate user research interview scripts, participant recruiting emails and creating research plans. It’ll give you a really good first draft that you can tweak as needed. Here are some GPT prompts to help you get started.
2. Perplexity.ai
Use Case: Secondary research
Price: Start for Free. Smarter models for $20 / month
How to Use It: Think of it like Goolge + ChatGPT. It gives you the answer to any question and then links the reference material so you dig deeper or check its work.
User research analysis
2. Looppanel
Use Case: Analyzing user research data
Price: Starts at $30 / month
How to Use It: Looppanel automates the time-consuming, tedious parts of research—making notes, auto-tagging data, and searching for the perfect quote. This cuts analysis time, making it possible to run analysis 10x faster.
3. Maze
Use Case: Unmoderated research
Price: Starting at $99/month
How to Use It: Do you need a quick test for a prototype before it goes out? Maze can help you with that. The software will also auto-analyze your recordings and provide a report of key results.
UI Design
There are a lot of tools popping up in this space. To be very honest, we’re yet to find an AI UX Design tool that does a decent job designing UI elements.
Here are some AI UX Design tools to keep an eye on (they’re not amazing yet, but they’re the most promising options).
4. Galileo
Use Case: UI Design with AI
Price: Is Galileo AI free to use? Galileo gives you a few free credits to get started, but after that costs upwards of $19 / month
How to Use It: If you try to use Galileo to design an entire landing page or UI in one go, it’s not great. Here’s what happened when we shared this prompt to create a homepage for a SaaS app:
Here’s the output it provided:
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t use any of these designs directly. Galileo AI seemed to do a better job when asked to do a better job when asked to do a specific task (e.g., create a design system), but we ran out of credits before we could truly test it out.
5. Uizard
Use Case: UI Design with AI
Price: Paid plans from $19/month
How to Use It: Uizard is the most advanced AI UI designer we’ve come across so far. You can use its AI to generate your UI from scratch. You can also chat with it to ask it to modify designs—this is particularly useful because the AI won’t get it 100% spot on (at least yet). Just a quick note: Usability and reliability are clearly low on the list of these products as they strive to innovate—we expect that this is a short term problem.
Here’s an example of Uizard’s AI UI Designs
Prompt: I need a website landing page for a SaaS app. The product is for UX Researchers. It helps them analyze user interviews 10x faster by making notes, auto-tagging data and simplifying analysis. Use this colour as a primary accent: #5B7EDB Keep the design clean and modern.
Output:
Again—not about to write home for this one, but the fact that I can keep tweaking it helps me get much closer to what I want.
Other designs made by Uizard:
We suspect that 1 year from now, this will actually be really useful for designing UI elements. It clearly can’t think that much, so a human designer will still be required.
Think about it like computers—they made us far more efficient, but you still need a person to work on them.
Writing & UX Copy
Sometimes you just don't know how to phrase something in your update email. Or writing the text for an onboarding flow throws you off. After all, designers aren’t hired for their writing skill.
That’s when these AI writing tools come in handy.
6. Tool: ChatGPT or Claude.ai
Use Case: UX Writing, internal presentations, or anywhere else you need to write
Price: Start for Free. Smarter models for $20 / month
How to Use It: Use ChatGPT or Claude to write or re-write content for you.
Below is an example of Claude.ai creating written content for an onboarding flow.
Prompt: Write the UX content for a basic onboarding flow for a user signing up for a saas app. These are the stages they'll go through
-Sign up page (input email, company, password, name)
-What's your use case? (analyzing interviews, analyzing surveys, creating a repository, just looking around)
-How did you hear about Looppanel?
-Setting up (buffering page)
Not bad to be honest!
If you want a full set of prompts to play around with, check out this list.
Brainstorming & Ideation
7. ChatGPT or Claude.ai (yes, again!)
Use Case: UX Writing, internal presentations, or anywhere else you need to write
Price: Start for Free. Smarter models for $20 / month
How to Use It: Hitting a wall? Ask ChatGPT or Claude to help you out.
Let’s take an example: your team is brainstorming ways to reduce drop off from new sign ups.
Ask Claude.ai, “How Might We reduce user drop off after sign ups for a consumer app?”
Now this does NOT mean you don’t need to think or push your imagination—Claude or ChatGPT will pull from the most common solutions out there, not the creative ones or ones that may work for your product context.
BUT, this is handy to double check that you haven’t missed any obvious answers or solutions.
8. Miro or FigJam AI
Use Case: UX Writing, internal presentations, or anywhere else you need to write
Price: Start for Free
How to Use It: We all love a whiteboard! Miro and FigJam have some handy tools to help you brainstorm or create a template for your team ideation sessions. Nothing path-breaking here, yet, but nice features all the same.
How NOT to Use AI in UX Design
While AI is really handy and can make you 100x more efficient, there are places where quality > efficiency still wins out with AI.
- Relying on AI to make complete UI Screens or UX Interactions. As you saw with our examples of Uizard and Galileo AI, we’re not here yet. And even if the AI could generate UI screens beautifully, it definitely doesn’t understand UX. On top of that, it doesn’t have the context of your company, users, past iterations that make YOU the best person for this job.
- Creating a User Persona. We’ve seen some tools that’ll ask you to type in a description of your user and then spit out a persona. These are useless. The whole point of creating a User Persona is talking to your users and deeply understanding who they are, not assuming who they are.
- Running User Interviews. Whether you’re thinking of automating user interview moderation or using synthetic users—don’t. Again, the whole purpose of the exercise is to actually talk to customers. Humans will surprise you in ways AI can’t predict! Let them.
These AI tools can be a huge help for UX designers. They can save time, provide valuable insights, and help create better user experiences. But remember, AI is just a tool. It's still up to you to use your creativity and design skills to make the most of it.
If you're a UX designer looking to stay ahead of the curve, getting certified in AI can be a smart move. But what exactly does an AI certification for UX designers involve?
Essentially, a certification for AI UX design focuses on teaching you how to use AI and UX Design tools and techniques to enhance your design process. You'll learn about things like data analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing. The goal is to help you create more user-friendly, personalized, and efficient designs by leveraging the power of AI.
There are a few different options for AI certifications in UX design. Here are the most popular options:
1. "AI for UX Design" certification from the Interaction Design Foundation
Description: In this comprehensive course, you will explore AI's impact on design and how to make the most of AI and your human skills to future-proof your career.
Time Commitment: 13 hours 30 mins over 6 weeks (Estimated)
Cost: You need to become a member at $9.59 and get access to all their courses
2. "AI UX Design" certification from the UX Design Institute.
Description: Through this course, you’ll explore how AI can help you design better and what you should consider when designing AI products. You’ll learn how to integrate tools like ChatGPT into your workflow, and what’s different about designing for AI-assisted experiences.
Time Commitment: 6 months
Cost: €3,350
Of course, getting certified in AI UX design does require some time and effort. Most courses take a few weeks to a few months to complete, and they can cost anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. But if you're serious about staying competitive in the field, it can be a worthwhile investment.
Short answer: AI isn't going to replace UX designers anytime soon.
Yes, , AI is getting smarter every day. It can do things like analyze data, create designs, and even write copy and it’s sure to change how UX designers work. It will make some parts of the job easier and faster.
For example, AI can automatically tag your user interview transcripts and help with design iteration.
YOU as a UX Designer have fundamental skills that AI cannot replace:
- Human-Centric Skills: UX design is fundamentally about understanding and designing for human needs, emotions, and behaviors. The empathy, intuition, and emotional intelligence that human designers bring to the table are irreplaceable.
- Complex Reasoning: While AI excels at processing vast amounts of data and recognizing patterns, it struggles with the kind of complex, nuanced reasoning that UX designers engage in daily. AI lacks the ability to do things like: some text
- weigh multiple, often conflicting, user needs against business objectives
- navigate ambiguous design problems with no clear right or wrong answers
- understand the subtle implications of design decisions on user behavior - Contextual Wisdom: UX designers bring a wealth of experience and contextual understanding that allows them to make informed decisions that go beyond data analysis.
- Creative Problem-Solving: The ability to think outside the box, challenge assumptions, and come up with innovative solutions is a uniquely human trait that drives the field of UX forward.
So, how will AI affect UX Design?
AI will definitely change the UX design world, but it won't replace the designers themselves. Instead, it will make their jobs more efficient and effective by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks. But at the end of the day, it's still the human touch that makes great UX design possible.
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