Transformation of the Product Design process with AI

Ismail Can Güleryüz
Appcent Design
Published in
5 min readJun 20, 2024

The world of product design is experiencing a major transformation due to the rapid advancements in AI. To grasp the impact of AI, we need to first understand the current product design process and then explore how AI tools can enhance this field.

Product Design Process

Product design process is methodical and often time-consuming. It typically includes several key stages:

  1. Research and Discovery: This phase involves understanding the market, identifying user needs, and analyzing competitors. Designers conduct surveys, interviews, and focus groups to gather data.
  2. Ideation: Based on the research, designers brainstorm ideas. Sketches, storyboards, and mood boards are created to visualize concepts.
  3. Prototyping: The best ideas are translated into prototypes. These can range from simple paper models to sophisticated digital mock-ups.
  4. Testing and Validation: Prototypes are tested with users to gather feedback. This step often requires multiple iterations to refine the design.
  5. Final Design and Development: Once a design is validated, it moves to the final development stage, where detailed specifications are created, and production begins.

This process, while effective, is inherently linear and can be slow. It relies heavily on human intuition and manual effort, which can introduce biases and errors.

How AI is Transforming Product Design

AI is poised to transform the product design process by introducing automation, enhancing creativity, and providing deeper insights. Here are some AI tools that product designers can implement to streamline their workflow

FOR RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY

Figjam AI:

With FigJam AI, Designers can streamline and improve the ideation stages in the product design process.

They can gain speed by optimising various aspects of the design process with FigJam AI, including project management activities such as idea generation, brainstorming meetings, design feedback and retrospectives.

Gemini & ChatGPT:

Designers can define a research framework and a roadmap during the research process.

With Gemini and ChatGPT’s ability to simplify complex topics, designers can create more intuitive designs.

https://gemini.google.com/

https://chat.openai.com/

FOR IDEATION:

Miro AI:

Miro’s latest AI feature marks a notable advancement in developing smarter, more efficient, and user-friendly digital collaboration platforms for designers. By enabling auto-structuring, offering intelligent suggestions, recognizing content, and boosting real-time collaboration, it significantly enhances the design workflow.

https://miro.com/assist/

Relume:

With Relume, Designers can accelerate their design process even before diving into UI design by utilizing detailed prompts. Relume offers powerful features to streamline their workflow:

  • The Information Architecture feature makes it easy for designers to create site maps.
  • With the Wireframe feature, designers can generate UX wireframes from these site maps in seconds.

https://www.relume.io/

FOR PROTOTYPING

UIZard:

With UIZard’s advanced AI features, designers can convert hand-drawn sketches into digital wireframes, and then use another UIZard feature to turn those wireframes into clickable/touchable prototypes.

TESTING AND VALIDATION

Attention Insight:

With Attention Insight Designers can test their design to see how users will interact with it, ensuring it meets their needs effectively.

Attention Insight is an AI tool that predicts user attention and visual engagement through eye-tracking algorithms. It provides heatmaps and clarity scores, helping designers optimize layouts for better user experience and higher engagement.

https://attentioninsight.com/

Gemini & Chat GPT:

Designers can get design feedback, with Gemini and Chat GPT’s image upload feature they can get specific UI and UX feedback on the screenshots they upload.

https://gemini.google.com/

https://chat.openai.com/

FINAL DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

Fontjoy:

With Fontjoy, Designers can create font combinations trained with deep learning.

Fontjoy brings together fonts that share certain similarities but contrast in a certain way from thousands of fonts introduced to deep learning in a meaningful way.

https://fontjoy.com/

Khroma:

Khroma uses AI to learn which colors designers like and then creates an unlimited number of palettes consistent with those colors.

Designers can train an AI-powered algorithm directly in their browser to create preferred color combinations.

Khroma has been trained with thousands of the most popular human-made palettes on the internet to produce amazing color combinations.

https://www.khroma.co/

Adobe Firefly & Dall-E & Midjourney:

Designers can create visual assets for landing pages and applications. Additionally, they can design banners and social media images to enhance the product’s marketing strategy. These tools allow designers to produce consistent, brand-aligned graphics.

https://www.adobe.com/products/firefly.html

https://openai.com/index/dall-e-3/

https://www.midjourney.com/home

Galileo AI

Designers can turn their prompts into editable UI designs in Figma. Galileo stands out with its high-quality design outputs and can generate designs in various sizes, including mobile and desktop.

https://www.usegalileo.ai/

Conclusion

AI tools like FigJam, Gemini, ChatGPT, Miro, Relume, UIZard, Attention Insight, Fontjoy, Khroma, and Galileo enhance every stage of product design, from research to final development. They streamline workflows, improve collaboration, and ensure products meet user needs and market demands.

As AI continues to evolve, its impact on product design will grow, enabling designers to create more functional, aesthetically pleasing, and user-centric products. The future of product design is here, and it’s powered by AI.

Visit Appcent Design & Appcent:

appcent.design

appcent.mobi

Sources:

--

--