5+ easy AI-powered tools to automate (boring) tasks in UX/UI projects
No-code, No prior knowledge required & Easy to use
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My profession as a (UX/UI) designer evolved over time, as did the technologies and tools I use in my practice. It started back in the days with a lot of HTML/CSS, switched to graphic design software like Photoshop, then to Sketch and now with browser-based and collaborative tools like Figma.
Regardless of the tool, many of my tasks were repetitive and time-consuming. As a result, I’ve begun to look into AI-powered tools to make my design process easier and more fun.
Keep reading below to discover five different ways to use AI in your design projects.
1. Text to UI components
Around this time last year, Shareef Shameem showed us how using a couple of words could generate any layout you want, including its JSX code by using GPT-3 (read the full paper of the technology here).
How does the text generating model work?
- A prompt is used to provide process input.
- Predict the next block of text using the training data.
- Make a new prediction based on the aggregated blocks of text, including the most recent one
- Repeat the first three stages until the text is the desired length.
This process works across multiple languages, even programming languages, which is why GPT-3 knows how to generate code.
Shareef took this project one step further and created Debuild.co, for everyone to use.
2. Text to Figma
Jordan Singer amazed us last year with “Designer”, a Figma plugin that has the ability to generate a functional prototype from natural language, using the same GPT-3 technology as described above. More details here.
In addition to that, Dhvanil created a tool that defines a full mockup with text, images and even logos. Watch it in action below or find more about the technology here.
A lot of designers started to talk about the tweets as this can drastically change the way we design, so discussions started to arise on this subject. Read one of my favourite reflections on this subject in the UX Collective article linked below.
3. Wireframe-to-UI in one click
Over the last years, UIzard showed us its capabilities as a tool that can turn hand-drawn wireframes into ready-made UI.
By simply taking a photo with your smartphone of your sketch drawn on paper, Uizard will transform it in a few moments into a high fidelity prototype. Once translated into digital, you can customize its style guides, export the design to Sketch and finally obtain the front-end code.
Some other tools that are sharing the same mission are Sketch2Code (Microsoft), TeleportHQ and others. We’ll add to this list Fronty as well, with the mention that they’re generating websites from images. This technology was also looked at in an article by Adobe.
4. Generative placeholders
Generated placeholders are very useful for UX/UI mocks because they just make sense and makes your product look more complete. It saves designers a lot of time, options are never-ending and it makes the project more creative.
Here are some of the generators that I use the most:
In addition to that, you can use https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/ for an exhaustive list of X things that do not exist.
5. Trained colour palettes
An AI-powered colour palette, Khroma is made exclusively for designers. You select 50 colours that you like that are used to train a neural network, which can recognize thousands of other colours that are similar to them. The model generates an infinite number of colour palettes based on your preferences.
The colour palettes you like will visualise different formats such as Type, Poster, Gradient, Image and Palette.
“Khroma uses AI to learn which colors you like and creates limitless palettes for you to discover, search, and save.”
You can read more about the complete process of how it works in their article below.
If you decide to try out some of the tools discussed here and you find them useful, please share this post so that other fellow creators can learn about it. I’ll be glad to know I could help!
Thanks for reading, Alexandra.
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