#23 Designing with AI: 3 Takeaway From Automation to Creativity
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The intersection of technology and design is closer than ever before. In today's episode of the future of UX, we will explore how AI is blurring the lines between human and machine creativity.

Hello friends and welcome back to the future of UX, your go-to source for all things about design, technology and user experience design. In today's episode, we are going to discuss the topic of AI for designers. AI or artificial intelligence.

has been making a lot of waves in the design industry in the last month, I would say. And today we will explore how designers can leverage this technology to enhance their workflows and create more intelligent design. So first of all, what is AI? I talked a little bit about it in some other episodes. And so you might want to listen to those as well if you're interested in the topic.

But the question that is a little bit more interesting to me is how does AI relates to design?

And at its core, AI refers to computer systems that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as recognizing patterns or understanding natural language. And in design, AI can be used for a variety of purposes, from automating boring or mundane tasks to generating really complex designs.

And I can already say before I'm diving a little bit deeper into the topic and also there are three things that you need to know as a designer. I just want to mention one thing. You might have already heard about it in other podcast episodes or also on Instagram, but I am hosting a live event next week. It's in one week.

and this event is about AI for designers it's on the 19th and 20th of April and yeah I will be hosting a two-hour webinar each evening this is a personal webinar on the topic of AI for designers

So as I mentioned, the event will be live, but of course everyone who attends receives the recording if they can make it live or if they just want to rewatch it afterwards. And during this live event, we will take a deep dive into what AI means for us designers. The event consists of six modules with three modules per evening.

We will start with the basics of AI, really like including what it is, what you need to know, terminologies and a lot of examples that it's tangible and that you, you know, in like a coffee conversations with the data scientists or with the AI specialist experience.

you know what they're talking about and you can actually discuss these topics with them. We will explore how you can prepare yourself and also future-proof your career and we will take a closer look at popular design tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney and many more and

The focus will be filtering out how we can best use them as designers. We're also going to explore AI design techniques and also ways to integrate it. So this is, I think, pretty interesting for us talking about the ethical issues and the risks. So this masterclass gives you the comprehensive overview you need to be up to date

I prepared all the slides, everything that you get this week and I honestly I'm so so so excited for this webinar. I am really looking forward to it and I have so many cool things to share. Also what I want to mention is everyone gets some kind of like a digital spread back. You find a lot of resources with like people to follow, AI tools to check out with links, everything's super organized.

you leave the webinar after the two days with a concrete plan of what to do in the future. And yeah, I'm just like really excited about it. Also the reason why I'm talking so much about it. If you want to learn more, you can just find the link in the description box. Check it out and hopefully see you at the webinar. And yeah, super excited for all the people who already signed up and were a part of this. Super excited to have you and

so so so excited for the webinar okay so i would say let's dive into the topic so about three things that are especially important for us as designer let's start with takeaway or important thing that we need to know number one so the first thing is ai can help designers save time and effort by automating tasks like

creating a set of icons or also generating design options. I think this is super interesting. I remember when I started out as a designer, so when I switched from graphic design to UX design and I started at an agency. What we have done in this agency, we did of course like UX research but also interface design. And for one client where I was responsible for the interface design,

I needed to design a set of icons. So I think it was around like 20 icons or something like that. It was for like a tech company. So basically all tech companies need very, very similar icons. And I still remember how I designed the settings icon. You all know how the settings icon looks. It's almost like all settings icons look very, very similar.

And then I remember a couple of weeks later or months later, someone who worked with me like on another project, but on a similar project was also designing a set of icons, also a settings icon and many other icons that are also designs. And this was the moment where I realized, wow, there are like so many things that are not organized properly.

in the ideal way. Everyone is doing some kind of like similar task and I'm sure that almost every designer has designed several settings icons. Maybe not at the moment, right? Because there are so many resources out there. The problem here is that it's really difficult to find them, to keep them organized, to keep track of everything. And this is where AI really gets into the workflow and helps you to

create consistent icon sets or also designs these icon sets for you consistently and I think this is pretty interesting. Also when I'm thinking about like automation or really saving time maybe you've already heard about the tool that helps you to transform hand-drawn sketches into working prototype. I also tried this tool out on Instagram and I created a reel about it so definitely check it out it's called ue-zart.

you can find it online definitely try it out if you want to and as well reducing the need for a manual coding and testing right i mean like testing is still pretty important so you still need the the testing part but but with coding i i guess like many of you have probably seen the keynote from chat gpt co-founder who draw some kind of like a sketch on his napkin

made a photo uploaded to chgbt and then chgbt created a whole website out of this sketch right so the whole repetitive task you can automate the the whole part from uh yeah the putting the sketch in html or javascript website pretty cool

And this really frees designers, people in general, up from all the repetitive tasks, from all the, you know, doing all the automation and helps people to really focus more on creative tasks where you need like your brain, where you need empathy, where you can use your critical thinking and really asking the right questions.

The second thing that is pretty important for us to keep in mind, and so the second takeaway or important thing, AI can expand the range of possibilities designers can explore by generating a wide range of designs that meet specific constraints and parameters.

For example, generating a design is a process in which designers provide a set of constraints and the AI system generates a range of potential design that meet those constraints. For example, thinking about an interface, then you know, okay, I need, for example, you know, it's like an online shopping interface, for example, and for like an online shopping delivery service.

the home screen and you know you have different constraints for example you know that you want to have the recommended ingredients on the top page for sure you don't know how they should look like they should be in a certain color palette that you can um that that you can define you know what kind of typography you want

you know that there will be another element but you're not really sure what makes sense so the AI creates these you know with the parameters that you defined a new interface creates a lot of variations that help you to test these different variations and then come up with the best solutions by testing it by really understanding or by evaluating which is better

And this really can help designers also explore a broader range of design options and discover new possibilities they may not have considered otherwise. Because when you need to design all these screens yourself, of course you need a lot of time for that, right? So also this part will be automated and will be taken over by AI if you want to.

Another example is the use of AI to generate design variations based on user feedback. And this is especially exciting for me as a UX designer who does a lot of testing and a lot of research and needs to evaluate all the design decisions with the user.

helping AI here in this process really allows designers to rapidly iterate and refine their designs. Okay, let's come to the takeaway or important thing to keep in mind. Number three, and this is probably one of the most important things to keep in mind. Designers

need to use AI ethically and responsibly to avoid biases and ensure the technology is being used in the best interest of users.

And I think this is so, so, so interesting, right? Because we are always talking about ethics and how important it is and that we as designers have so much responsibility. And yeah, there are biases, but what does it really mean? Like concrete examples. And I can give you one. Biases can actually happen when the data is trained with bias. And today I had a pretty interesting conversation

Yeah, something pretty interesting happened to me because I did some research for the webinar that I'm doing. I have like a really big chapter about ethics, about what ethics means, especially for AI, what are biases and what does it mean for designers? What do we need to know? And I did some testing. One really big problem that I'm seeing with AI tools is they are thinking in stereotypes.

Because the people who trained them are usually white males. Unbelievable. And I have one example. So today I used Midjourney, the tool that creates images for you. And I let Midjourney create an image for a doctor in a hospital.

Okay, so I typed in doctor in a hospital and guess what came out of the image generation? Usually like Midjourney creates four different images. All of the images that Midjourney created were white males. And then I did another test. I type in imagine with Midjourney, imagine nurse in a hospital. And guess what happens? I got four images.

white females in a hospital so nurse and then i actually googled because i wasn't sure like does nurse maybe just mean female but of course no like a nurse can be female can be male doctor can be female can be male also there are different um you know you don't need to show just like white people that's actually not okay and this shows that the whole system is biased

Then I tried a competitor, Adobe Firefly, which is still in beta. It was pretty interesting because they obviously don't want to get in that trap and bias the output. So I did the same test there. And when I typed in doctor in a hospital,

I got four images, different ethnological backgrounds, some were black, Asian, very different, and male and female 50/50. The same with nurse. So there,

I felt that it was trained based on totally different data. And with mid-journey, I was honestly really, really shocked to see that there was a lot of bias when someone really trained the images. Because also training these systems works like that, that you put in certain images and you name them, you label them.

And obviously, there were not a lot of images for the AI to be trained with female black doctors, for example, right? Like with different also...

ethical backgrounds, which I think is pretty interesting to see. And this is of course something where we as designers also need to be aware of, right? Because we are also a part of that system and need to be aware of that. What are biases? How does it happen? Like how are the, how is the AI trained? Do we know that? Also, what do we like talk the, what do we actually tell our users?

Those are all the things that we need to be very critical about and I think is pretty interesting for us.

Yes, what does it mean? So designers need to be aware of these issues and take steps, of course, to ensure that they're using AI ethically and responsibly. And this can include using diverse and representative training data, testing the AI system for bias, and also being transparent with users about how AI is being used. Another example,

is the use of AI to detect and remove offensive or harmful content from user-generated content such as comments or reviews. So there are a lot of examples. So let's summarize the three things to keep in mind. Number first is AI is going to automate tasks. We already know that. It will save time and hopefully also free up time for the designer to focus more on creative tasks. Number two is

is AI is going to expand the range of possibilities AI will help the designers in their workflow. For example, create a variety of design options or

Help to adjust designs based on user feedback, for example. So it's some kind of like a co-worker or an assistant that supports the design process, not only the automation, also the creative task when it comes to creating different variations or adding feedback or iterating on the design. And number three is the ethical part.

being very transparent about what is the training data, how can we use the AI responsibly, what does really being transparent mean for us. Okay.

Three takeaways. I hope this was helpful. I also added some content in the description box in case you want to check it out. Don't forget to sign up for the AI webinar if you still want to join. There are not a lot of spaces left, but if you want to join us, you won't regret it.

and yes I think AI is a super interesting topic to dive into for us as designers we are in the beginning of a really big revolution so AI is going to change a lot whether it's automating tasks generating new design ideas or also analyzing user behavior AI has a lot of

a lot to offer for the design industry. And as designers, it's up to us to explore the possibilities and use this technology ethically and responsibly. Okay, that's it for today, friends. Thank you so much for tuning in. Don't forget to check out the webinar. And yes, thank you so much for listening and see you in the future.