AI Transforms UX/UI Design Forever: How?
AI is the language we are starting to use to communicate with machines. As the ones building the platforms for that communication, UX designers are going to have important challenges in the years to come.
What UX/UI Designers Need To Know
Ok, the tech business is tricky right now. And the tech jobs market even more. But not every area is in the same situation: artificial intelligence is growing at an incredible rate. NASSCOM, an association of Indian software and services companies that measures the tech industry worldwide, is saying that the global AI market is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of more than 38% from last year to 2030. But growth is not where the problem lies. UX, especially, is an area that’s going to be impacted in ways we can’t even imagine, but we can try to predict.
NASSCOM also claims that some of the most important changes will happen in the user interface and user experience (UI/UX) departments. According to them, among the top trends in UI UX for 2023 there will be: generative AI, augmented reality, and data-driven personalization. All AI-powered features will bring game-changing possibilities and challenges. But it is not in the front end that the possibilities of artificial intelligence will thrive.
According to the same source, the role of AI within UX design will likely increase especially in areas such as user analysis and information architecture. This means that the power to collect data and process the largest databases known to humanity will allow machines to study the best practices identified on the web to develop different wireframes. Designers could use this to feed multiple, more dynamic propositions and to build more adaptable user environments. These changes could impact the whole Digital Environment in very interesting ways.
Generative UI Is Coming For Us All
With the advances that AI is bringing to product development and testing, the capability of escalating data to prefigure different responsive designs online is going to be a powerful communication tool. Not only to communicate business with clients or with other businesses but to allow communication between humans and machines.
In the short term, UX designers will have to quickly learn and incorporate the AI tools that are flooding the market and will continue to be released this year. Until now, the design needed to be responsive, and adaptive and work in controlled environments. That will start to gradually change. Also, the huge volumes of information will require not only new ways of processing all the data but fake data sets with which to test products. And these tools already exist: companies like Tonic.ai or Gretel.ai are already providing what they call synthetic data. In this new market, companies and their designers should be savvy in the art of constantly evolving and adapting to the ever-changing landscape. Consumers, devices, and products all generate enormous amounts of information. The key is to get really good at reading and concluding what all that data brings forward.
But this is nothing compared to the changes that are soon to come in the UX world. With the implementation of AI, designers should expect a shift in paradigm in the years to come. Mainly, the use of natural language as an interface that allows communication between humans and machines. Code will no longer be the sole way to program and work with an AI. Be prepared to make place for even more written and spoken prompts.
Moreover, as the Internet of Things continues to penetrate the Natural Environment, displays will have to change the way in which they adapt to different devices and scenarios. The trend is for screens to start disappearing in the background. Displays will be spread out in the environment, attached to undefined formats and figures. We are all hearing the news, and seeing the prototypes: intelligent cars, glasses, fridges, toilets, and even doors. Computers will soon need to communicate with us from an almost infinite variety of surfaces, with a field of possibilities much greater than our current mobile or widescreen. The same weather animation would have to be visible in an alarm clock, a coffee maker, and a bathroom mirror, we will need to read the transit indications on our glasses and on the windshield: the design will have to take on a new form. Of course, this will be a gigantic task for designers, even an impossible one. Thankfully, they’ll have AI to assist them.
That is when a need for a generative UI comes in: thanks to the massive data and the dynamic tools AI provides, the design will have to turn more abstract and be reduced to some minimum requirements: designers do not know the surface on which a menu will be cast. We are witnessing the power that AI is bringing in some of the design tools being used and sold for other areas. For example, in the field of industrial design, Fusion 360 is a software application that offers the option of generative design: the use of artificial intelligence that uses cloud information and machine learning to provide a menu of solutions made from the designer’s input of cost, manufacturing constraints, and performance requirements. This means more options that go beyond human speed and also the human way of thinking.
It is a matter of time before these kinds of artificial intelligence are the ones in charge of deciding how to broadcast and show data to users. Without screens, keyboards, and mouses, but an array of different surfaces in which information will be shown, AI will act as the ultimate UI/UX ally. AIs will have to anticipate the way in which humans respond to a particular situation and context making decisions for any particular moment. Of course, that would be an impossible task for a team of designers. Good UX will require them to engage and learn how to communicate and benefit from these tools.
UI/UX designers will be leading characters in the close future, in the way humans and machines interact. They have the responsibility to expand the source of human inputs and the challenges of reinventing their work to adapt to the adaptable. As always, AI is a challenge but is also an opportunity.
