Analytical Report on the Present and Future Use of AI in the UI/UX Design Industry
I. Introduction
Artificial intelligence in the design industry is becoming more and more prevalent. The everyday use of AI tools has exploded in popularity, especially over the last year following the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Midjourney. Companies have incorporated AI into their applications through recommendations and customer service chatbots. UI/UX designers already have multiple AI tools at their fingertips, with more being developed constantly. This report goes over the current usage of AI in the UI/UX design process, and how AI will impact the industry in the future.
II. How AI Can Be Incorporated in the Design Process
Within the UI/UX design process, an obvious use for AI is in testing/data analysis, as it is in many other industries. While user testing, AI can aid with processing quantitative data of eye tracking, click-through rates, user flow patterns and where users are experiencing difficulty. It can also help with condensing survey or interview data into key insights or even administering interactive surveys in real time to identify pain points and get feedback. User research and competitive analysis can also become more efficient. AI can scour the internet for trustworthy information on the target users and app competition quicker than a human.
Image generation is another use of AI that is popular already. UI/UX Designers can generate visual ideas for different apps and content to gain inspiration and consider a wider range of possibilities. In addition, when designers are thinking about user journeys and user flows, AI can generate assets like storyboards and user flow diagrams given the right information. This can cut down the amount of time a designer has to spend creating the diagrams and charts, and allow them to focus more on the content.
In terms of what the end user sees, personalization using AI is becoming increasingly advanced. Companies like Spotify and Pinterest use AI models to provide music and image recommendations to users. They analyze user interests and interactions on their site to provide them content that align with the user’s tastes.
Since AI can be so intuitive to user needs, it can often solve user problems without the user even knowing that they have one. This is a revolutionary benefit to AI that will drastically change the way we interact with technology in the future. A current small example of this is Google using AI to create autocomplete suggestions while the user is typing an email or a search.
III. Current AI tools in UI/UX
Within Figma, there are many AI based plugins, generally to do with generative content such as generating icons or illustrations. Since anyone can create these AI plugins, there is a large number of them available.
For user testing, UXCam is a tool that tracks people’s behavior when testing an app with heatmaps and a recording of each test session. It helps testers get insights into the effectiveness of certain design decisions, any pain points the user faced, as well as what worked and didn’t. UserTestings is another tool that scans user feedback to identify trends and themes so that designers can focus on the main points.
Image generation allows people to add content to existing images or create new images from text inputs. Midjourney is a popular example of this. Designers can use these tools to generate images for inspiration and brainstorming, as well as create stock images. Adobe Firefly is a newer text-to-image tool that can generate a variety of images that are not copyrighted and free to use. This is because the Firefly model is trained only off of Adobe stock images that are not copyrighted. Below are examples of both photo-realistic and storyboard style images generated by Adobe Firefly.
IV. Views of Current Designers and Consumers
Adobe surveyed 13,000 of their consumers and 4,250 customer experience/marketing professionals in 14 different countries including the US, UK, India, Japan, Germany, and more. 57 percent of all consumers said that AI will increase their creativity, and within Gen Z that number is increased to 75 percent. From the perspective of a user, 72 percent of consumers said that AI will improve their own customer experiences. Within the customer experience/marketing professionals, about 90 percent said that it will help them do more and better work. Below is another breakdown of what all surveyed Adobe consumers think is important for companies using AI.
Renato Antonio Bertao and Jaewoo Joo surveyed 123 UI/UX designers in Brazil, who mainly viewed AI as a co-creator that would work with them in the design process, rather than something that would automate the whole process. When asked about future AI roles in UI/UX, they saw AI as a functional tool mainly for data processing and for steps like planning, researching, and testing. Right now, most designers seem to look to AI for virtual assistance and data processing.
V. Predictions and Recommendations
Personalization of different apps is already in use, through recommendations or parts of the user interface itself. Moving forward, apps will become hyper-personalized (while maintaining brand identity) to the point where one person’s user interface could differ immensely from another’s based on their habits and preferences.
Data processing using AI is already advanced, and will continue to advance exponentially, being able to gather research and insights faster and from a wider variety of sources. Perhaps new types of user testing will also come into play.
The industry must be careful to train AI models on a variety of users, because AI should be able to take the diverse set of users in the world into consideration when designing for them. Some examples include users with disabilities, different cultural backgrounds, and ages. If not properly trained, the AI may make biased decisions that reflect a lack of knowledge and data about certain people.
The use of AI should not become a dependency on AI and the human touch to a design should not be removed. Ultimately, UI/UX designers are designing applications for the best possible user experience, which is an empathy-centric job at its core. Artificial intelligence cannot have this empathy; it can only replicate design patterns it learns. The loss of human input into something that is designed for humans to use everyday would be counterintuitive.
However, we can look forward to the use of AI as an assistive technology, something that can boost creativity and productivity, and a tool that can optimize user experiences to create new ways to interact with tech.
Sources
- Bertão, Renato Antonio, and Jaewoo Joo. “Artificial Intelligence in UX/UI Design: A Survey on Current Adoption and [Future] Practices.” Blucher Design Proceedings, Dec. 2021, https://doi.org/10.5151/ead2021-123
- Cheung, John. “How Will AI Impact UX Design?” CareerFoundry, 13 Nov. 2023, careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/ai-ux-design/#the-impact-of-ai-on-ux-design
- “How AI Technology Will Transform Design — Smashing Magazine.” Smashing Magazine, 3 Mar. 2023, www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/03/ai-technology-transform-design
- Lawrence, Nick. “AI in UI | 2023 and Beyond — UX Planet.” Medium, 6 Jan. 2023, uxplanet.org/ai-in-ui-2023-and-beyond-346b4602eff7
- Mukerji, Dhananjay. “AI in User Experience (UX) Design: A Fresh Approach.” Medium, 18 Aug. 2023, uxplanet.org/ai-in-user-experience-ux-design-a-fresh-approach-c7c7956daad8
- Offerman, Stefan. Generative AI Will Play a Starring Role in Customer Experiences | Adobe Blog. 21 Mar. 2023, blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/03/21/research-generative-ai-will-play-starring-role-in-customer-experiences