AI + UX fundamentals: Unleash your exponential creativity

This is Part 2 of a 5-Part series on how AI is revolutionizing the field of UX design, and how to keep your skills sharp. Read time ~4 min. If you haven’t read Part 1, read that first!

Last post, I shared how “Promptcraft” is becoming a crucial new skill in the field of UX design. But do generative AI tools render traditional design skills obsolete? Should we brace ourselves to kiss our jobs goodbye?

Far from it.

Design discipline core principles still apply in the Age of AI.

The medium we swim through may be changing, but at the end of the day, we’re still creating experiences for People. Empathy with our customers and solving their pain-points is still the name of our game.

The Importance of Timeless Design Fundamentals

Creating effective products and brands will still require deep empathy and knowledge of your user.

Sure, ChatGPT can generate text for you... but which persona will get a kick out of content generated in the voice of a pirate? Or in rhyme? What’s the right tone to strike with your generated words and imagery to resonate with the market you serve?

What problems are they trying to fix in their day-to-day, and how do their priorities stack up? What clicks with your audience?

Without the Mindset of a designer to focus their power, generative tools are a flailing firehose.

Direction is still the role of human creatives (for the moment!).  But WITH that designer mindset, we're now equipped with exponential creativity.  

Armed with the fundamentals of UX design, let’s look at how AI tools will enhance our output different sub-disciplines of the Design field.

Interaction design



Interaction designers (also called product designers in some companies) still need to know the basics of how to guide a user’s attention, step-by-step. It’s still our job to divvy up complex user journeys into a sequence of bite-sized transactions, so that our users don’t get frustrated and quit before the journey is over.

But once we have those sensibilities under our belt... how long should it take to actually mock it up?

How many hours of uninterrupted focus do we need to bang out that interaction flow, or try out multiple versions?

When you’re in the weeds of designing UI mockups, someday soon your prompts will generate UI elements in seconds...

- clusters of controls & components

- page content strings

- code snippets

- splash images

...and so forth.

Like this Figma plugin demo from Jordan Singer:

I think that seeing these kinds of tools come to life stirs mixed feelings for designers and creatives in general... because one of the major drivers for creative people is the joyful feeling of being in the flow state.

For Interaction designers, the satisfaction of designing mockups is similar to solving little puzzles.  So the prospect of automating that with AI makes designers be like...



“Hey, we like putting on our heaphones, bumping the volume on our playlists and jamming in Figma! Don’t take our quiet pixel-puzzle time away from us!”



I can definitely relate to this as a product designer. However, as the AI models migrate out from first-layer platforms to become features within our existing apps (Figma, Photoshop, Notion, etc), I think these tools will actually help us stay in that flowstate with less context-switching. Imagine being able to use voice input to verbally tell Figma how to adjust an auto-layout group, instead of having to manually fuss with the layers.

We’ll still need those blocks of creative focus time, but each of us will be able to do More during those sessions, freeing up our time for other tasks. Each of us can become an agency unto ourselves.

Won’t this just push stakeholder expectations higher?

 Yes, but it will also give us greater autonomy in how we spend our time between reviews, because tasks like exploring different variations won’t take as long.

(More on the tension between the creative flowstate and AI-assisted work here. Coming soon)

Content Design

It’s hard to overstate how important good content design is, and in a world where anyone can generate tons of content and pages in moments... those who understand when enough is enough will be valuable.

For example, if you overload your pages with generated text, a user’s eyes will glaze over. They'll get lost mid-way through the UX flow. 'Progressive disclosure' is still key.

We’ll need to be more vigilant than ever about pruning away excess, reducing cognitive load and overwhelm for the most frictionless experience.

Simplifying takes time and concentrated creative focus. But generative tools can also summarize content for us. It can distill content into the essence, or expand it out into greater sophistication.

Content designers will use tools like Chat GPT, Jasper.ai, and Notion AI to speed up their thought-process, producing succinct taglines and body copy, and generating fresh ideas for headlines.

UX Research

On the Research level, testing and evaluation is still important. AI tools will speed up the process of iterative user testing (making assets for A/B tests, writing out test plans, etc).

They will also help researchers to summarize user responses into actionable recommendations.

I'm pretty interested in this myself. If you've ever had to review a dozen usertesting recordings to get the takeaways, then you know what a grind this can be... Let alone 60+ transcripts, if you're testing at scale!

The idea of being able to draw those actionable insights from robo-oracles and get right back into the flowstate of designing the next round is exciting.

Visual Design

On the visual side of design, AI tools will supercharge our ability to flip through choices:

• color palettes

• fonts

• pixel spacing dimensions

• creating design system styles

Imagine telling Figma...

"Generate 4 options for a color palette. Include one with a light peach and a soft, misty lavender as the primary brand colors. Include a complimentary accent color that will resonate with our user persona profiles."

Because it takes less time to try different ideas, designers will be flipping through creative decisions with minimal friction.

But without knowledge of the visual design curriculum, such as...

• color theory

• composition

• lighting

• motion principles

• etc

...They won’t have the intuition to know which options are the right choices for the desired result.

They won’t know what makes it good.

The practiced eye still has value.

So, with our knowledge of design fundamentals supercharged by AI tools, the next question is... What will we be working on?

You may have heard the rise of AI compared to the rise of smartphones.

When the iphone became popular, a raft of mobile-based companies spun up around the ‘Uber for (insert service)’ business model.

In much the same way, many, many companies are flooding into the space of ‘AI for (insert service)’ under the rallying cry of ‘Cognify ALL the things.’



So it’s a good bet that as designers, we’ll soon be designing AI tools, as well as using them. Let’s explore this dynamic in the next post.

Go here for Part 3.