Using AI in Design
An AI generated image showing an AI assistant helping a designer.
I was blown away by the growth and development of Artificial Intelligence over the past year. We are clearly on the cusp of a new era of technology driven by such enormous potential that it is hard to grasp how the landscape of work and technology will change.
I’m doing my best to keep up with the curve and learn to use AI as an effective partner for my design work. It’s a little bit scary to see what AI can spit out and how quickly, but continuing growth, practice, and curiosity for new trends and technologies is the best way to fortify your career.
So, here’s how I’m currently utilizing AI.
Personal Assistant
The most obvious way to use AI is to help yourself with recommendations, synthesis, and ideating. The speed at which these Natural Language Processing models (NLPs) operate is one of their greatest strengths. I was inspired by Tanner Christensen to set aside time to journal about my work day every day. I now have about three months worth of work data that I can feed into my AI of choice and let it synthesize that data for me. What were my biggest accomplishments? Where did I struggle? How did I go above and beyond?
Research Assistant
I also started to use AI to act as a junior UX researcher. We have a ton of reviews on our site (and our competitors do as well). I can easily feed in data to NLPs and ask for places our company excels. How do our competitors stack up? Are there any patterns where we need to do better or where we should continue to sharpen our edge? I can then feed it some of our company objectives and ask it to identify patterns or suggest creative solutions. Obviously this research is just a small piece of the UX puzzle, and right now it all needs to be vetted by human eyes, but it can certainly speed things up.
Content Generation Partner
After reading the wonderful Articulating Design Decisions by Tom Greever, I’ve stopped using lorem ipsum text in my designs. It is simply too distracting for stakeholder feedback and as a design leader I have enough business context to use relevant text. However, sometimes I would get in the weeds of the text. AI allows me to get a first draft of content and structure that then allows me to design and refine. I feed it large blocks of text and bullet points and then specify exactly how I want it formatted back to me.
For Fun!
Also the AI art generation is pretty cool! My images in this blog post were all AI generated. Take a look at my iterations through DALL·E. I do think we’ll need to consider and legislate the ethics of art, writing, and AI…but that’s a post for a different time.
