5 Ways Generative AI Will Change the Way You Think About UX and UI Design

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1:33We got a spicy one for you, Built Right listeners. Today, we're breaking down the five ways generative AI will change the way you think about UX and UI design. And by the way, number two, I believe will actually create a complete shift in the way we think about designing and building software. So make sure to stick around for that one. But to help me do it today, I'm joined by Hatchworks own Andy Silvestri, who brings 20 years of experience in the digital design space, including graphic design, creative design, user experience, customer experience, product strategy, all of the things. And he even ran his own experience strategy and design firm for 10 years prior to leading our product design practice here at Hatchworks.

2:18And he's a returning guest. So check out episode two if you like this one with Andy. But welcome back to the show, Andy. Hey, thanks, Matt. It's good to be back. Yeah, good to have you on. I'm really excited about this topic and this format that we're going to get into today. So we at Hatchworks have been digging into everything generative AI as of late, as it relates to the world of UX and UI design, specifically for this conversation, from testing new tools, talking to folks in the industry. And what we've done is we've distilled all of these learnings down to five key points. So you don't have to.

2:54And this includes how it's making things easier, better, faster, but also what we need to watch out for. And plus things that may sound completely foreign now, you know, we believe this is going to be standard practice in the future. So trying to help you get ahead of that. So without further ado, Andy, let's get into number one. So I'll key it up for us and let you take it from there. But number one is taking this shift from an imperative to a declarative design approach. Take us through that. Like, what is what does this mean and how is this going to evolve? Yeah. So I think like, you know, as practitioners, right, we're coming from this time of like, you know, you point and click in the imperative fashion of doing everything.

3:35Right. And now we're getting into this model, of course, where like you can declare what you want from the tool. Right. I can say, give me this, give me that. And the tool will use its AI powers to give you a result. Right. So I think that focus on moving more into this declarative approach to design is really an interesting one because that idea of working along perhaps a design co-pilot of sorts, where you have this running narrative with the generative AI tool, that really has the potential to be a pretty big game changer. And not only from the standpoint of like just a singular prompt and response where I'm like, hey, you know, give me a design that has this, this and this and the thing gives it to you, but maybe more so the ability to work through like a design brief and, you know, refining a narrative, tweaking things, adjusting things, that kind of stuff.

4:24Um, so really like it's this kind of dialogue you have with the machine, right? Um, and seeing that as having a really big kind of upside to streamlining the process, right. Especially for, you know, smaller teams where it's maybe a designer of a design team of one, right. And, you know, like maybe you're a startup, you have a smaller budget, right. So you're really kind of leveraging the tool as almost a, you know, again, a co-pilot or another designer on your team. there are some tools out there that are kind of embracing this kind of dialogue approach you know when like there are lots of stuff in beta right now so it would be interesting to see where this goes right we've seen it from like kind of the the imagery perspective like give me a still image or give me an illustration but still in the sense of like screen design there are some big players who haven't really weighed in specifically you know Figma and by extension Adobe.

5:20So it's going to be really interesting to see what they bring to the table. Yeah, it's really interesting. This one kind of, as you start to think about it, it blows my mind a bit because there's been so many best practices established with the way we've done things to date. There are heuristics and some of that will still stay around, but it's based on the human interacting with a machine in a particular way. Right. And, you know, these generative AI tools and way of interacting with a machine via natural language, it's still got room for improvement. But I always look back to like cell phones back in the day when we were playing Snake or the Internet back in the day when we were dialing up on AOL.

6:02Like things have progressed so much and you already see what's happening with generative AI, how fast it's progressing. like this has the potential to really shift how we interact with technology, which really kind of flips on its head, potentially how we've been doing things in a big way to date. Quick break in the pod. If you're listening to this podcast, chances are you've been thinking about how to actually use AI inside your business. And that's exactly why we built the AI Opportunity Finder. It's a free tool that helps you uncover high impact, tailored AI use cases based on your business, your goals, your pain points, and your industry.

6:39No fluff, no generic use cases, just real ideas that fit your business and the ranked by ROI potential. It takes about three minutes to run and it's like having your own personal AI strategist for free. If you want to try it for free, check out the link in the show notes or go to hatchworks.com backslash AI dash opportunity dash finder. Yeah, a hundred percent. There's always that kind of room for improvement, room for advancement. I think that we're seeing that right now in this moment with all these tools that are coming out. And really the hard part, I think, right now is staying on top of it all, right?

7:12So it's been an interesting ride for sure. I think it'll be interesting too, you know, you think of this concept of like the innovators dilemma, take a Salesforce or a HubSpot or, you know, that's how their whole solution is built. I mean, most solutions today. How are they going to adapt this new way of interacting with technology? You know, do they adapt and make the shift potentially upset some existing customers to try to try to stay ahead? Or is it going to be what we've seen so many times, newer competitors coming into the space without the bloat? And that gets back to an interesting point you just made.

7:49You may not need an army of people to do some of this stuff. So that it changes the game a bit. Yeah. It's kind of an interesting subset of that. Like, you know, example for what Adobe is currently doing with their AI tools, right? They're kind of slow rolling things into their existing product base, right? So you're seeing like a feature here and a feature there come into Photoshop or come into Illustrator, right? I think just today they released a color, a modification tool piece within Illustrator, right? So, I mean, that's one approach, right? Is like kind of just tease it out, get a little bit of proof of concept, get a little bit of, you know, traction around something before just kind of throwing a huge new application right in front of people, like kind of meet them where they are in their current workflows.

8:31So yeah, it's an interesting aspect of how all this stuff is coming together. So that's number one, shift from imperative point and click to more of a declarative chat focused design, how that's going to impact user experience and something to stay on top of. Number two, and this is the one I called out earlier. I think this is one of the most interesting ones, I think. It's the ability to get to proof of concept quicker. And some of this is obvious, but we've been playing around with some tools that, whether it's that tool or that concept or idea, somebody else adopts it. But there's big potential here to really accelerate this process.

9:08But take us through this one. Yeah, this is great. And I mean, this is probably, at least in my opinion, one of the biggest upsides to at least currently using generative AI in design. And, you know, from both the standpoint of like low fidelity, medium fidelity, high fidelity, all those things, I think the idea is, you know, why not use these tools when the stakes are low, right? Like if you're in a, you know, kind of a ideation phase or a concepting phase, grinding out multiple iterations of flows, wireframes, interface concepts, you know, components, anything to support a proof of concept, it's not really going to be a slog anymore, right?

9:44Like you want to get, you know, using these tools to get directionally correct will take a lot less time. Right. And, you know, probably in a in an interesting way, people are kind of afraid of this idea of, oh, it's going to replace designers completely. But I think it's actually going to open up the door for designers to become even more exploratory in those early ideation and concepting processes. Right. Because you're going to have more time because you're not necessarily doing all the heavy lift in the back end. And so if, for example, I can say to a tool, hey, I need three concepts of this, this and this and give it some requirements and kind of work through that prompting and then take what it gives me and then leverage what it's giving me to kind of refine it further as needed.

10:29It's a big step up from just, OK, I got to make three concepts and I got to think through everything, every single piece. So, yeah, I think this is going to be a really big, big lift in terms of workflow. And again, like in that earlier phase, I think is when it's going to be most profound in terms of just kind of saving time. Yeah. You think of how we interact with our clients today, that upfront piece, it gets shortened so much. You almost could think of this world in the future where you're in a workshop and you're actually getting an idea as you're working through the workshop. Right. And then there's the debate of, OK, well, is, you know, whiteboards still superior because, you know, if you start to get real looking designs, the discussion immediately shifts to color and placement and not the core function piece of things.

11:21Right. Right. I think that's where like kind of the yeah, like the tactful use of those tools in those scenarios, I think is what's going to be paramount. Right. Because you can think about that of, you know, yeah, we might be going through and doing a workshop, getting some stuff on the whiteboard with a client. We come back and we say, OK, give us give us a week to turn around some some rough proofs of concept that might be. Let's do it right now, you know, with what we just ideated through and see what we can get. But of course, like to your point, leveraging it at the fidelity that makes the most sense of that.

11:51Yeah, you don't jump too far ahead or get down a rabbit hole and get kind of distracted from like the discovery task at hand. Right. But, but yeah, I mean, that's a really, that's a really good way to think about it of like, you know, let's put, let's put the concept and let's create like the artifact for it much more in a much, you know, lighter lift and, and, and use that to kind of, you know, further the conversation. So that's what I mean by kind of getting it, you know, getting quicker and getting like, you know, getting to the concept and getting it kind of out the door in an efficient manner.

12:19Yeah. And you mentioned 1.2. So it's two things in my view. I've heard some others express this too. The minimum bar, you know, is going to be raised or lowered, I guess, in whichever way you look at it in terms of like, it's going to be so much easier to do stuff. Right. But I think to your point, it elevates the true practitioners, the true designers, you know, that skillset. It's like back to the, back to the Renaissance, like, you know, it's the artists, it's those folks that start to become more empowered. And I think that's, That's the future is those type of folks become even more important, critically important as this new technology starts to take shape.

13:03Yeah, for sure. 100%. Right. So that's number two, getting to this proof of concept quicker, multiple iterations of proof of concept testing, that whole idea of the agile mindset. It just accelerates things. But getting to number three, this is more of the cautionary tale one. So exercise caution when leveraging generative AI tools and solutions. So take us through the more doomsday one on the list here. Yeah, right. Yeah, I think this is kind of like, you know, a good one to think about in that it highlights the need for curation, I think, like now more than ever. Right. Like, and I mean that from the sense that it's not just about proofing the quality of what comes back from these tools, but, you know, proofing for bias, proofing for inaccuracies.

13:52inaccuracies, you know, copyright infringement's been in, you know, a lot of the conversation around using some of these tools, right? So, you know, there's still a very real need, I think, for a designer's eye to want, you know, going back to what you were just saying about the resonance, right? Like there's still a need for like this skill set. And we will still need to employ, I think, a very good bit of common sense when we're using these tools, right? Like right now, whenever we kind of, you know, are looking through things that we see in the space that are generated via AI, there's a bit of like a tell or like a look and feel that I think this imagery is taking on, right?

14:27Like maybe there's odd angles. The shadows are off. Depth of field is not quite right. Proportions are weird. You know, the thing I think about, it's kind of like when Photoshop became more mainstream and like Photoshop turned into a verb, like you could tell that something had been Photoshopped, right? Like, and, you know, I think people that have been doing this for a while kind of are seeing that kind of tell of like, oh, AI is doing this and something's not quite right. So, I mean, that's one way to think about it. I think, I guess the scary thing is, you know, just in what we've seen in the last couple of months of this, you know, this stuff becoming mainstream is how good will it get, right?

15:03Like if you see the increase in quality that, you know, just a few months of, you know, since Chad Tipee, he dropped the market, right? And there's this increased focus on more sophisticated prompting and prompt engineering is becoming like a real thing. And people are learning more about how to use these tools and interact with them. So like very soon, like very, very soon that tell, you know, may be indiscernible from reality. So that's the one thing that's kind of like, okay, let's use curation. Let's, let's kind of, let's curate this. Let's, let's make sure that we are using a bit of common sense.

15:34And, and maybe that goes into how we actually disseminate the work in an honest fashion, right? Like, you know, somehow indicating that this was used, this was made using AI tools to help with the design, that kind of thing. So it's very interesting times. We're kind of still in that gray area, right? But I think that, you know, with good practice, we'll get there. Yeah. And, you know, there's going to be instances that we saw recently, this is more chat GPT focus, but the lawyer that was creating a legal brief off of chat GPT, and it just, it completely hallucinated, just completely false information.

16:10And what does that begin to look like on more of the design side? You know, I think that'll be interesting to see. To your point, like, does it look like it's been produced through generative AI? Is that a negative, you know, connotation there? But you mentioned it earlier. It's this concept of co-pilot. That's the important piece. It's your co-pilot. It's not, you know, set it and forget it. What was it? Was that the George Foreman grill back in the day? Or one of those? Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. But you said it, I mean, like, it's kind of interesting, right? Like, just as like Photoshop coming to the masses, like allowed a lot more people to, you know, manipulate their imagery and, you know, quite frankly, you know, do better work with the types of photos they were taking.

16:55This is a similar kind of effect, right, where it's not all bad, right? I mean, just because something has been AI'd, you know, doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be a bad thing for, you know, just to get access, raising that baseline, getting more people into design, getting familiar with the tools. I think that's a, you know, kind of a silver lining to this kind of cautionary doom and gloom kind of outlook to AI replacing jobs and things like that. So, again, very interesting taking the good with the bad, but, you know, we'll see where it goes. So this generative AI kind of democratizing AI and potentially design related things, good or bad, in your opinion?

17:33I think it's a good thing, right? I think the more we as society can get better with the tools, of course, there's always a negative side to new technology. And there's people that are going to use it for negative things and bad actors. All that stuff's going to happen. But I think generally speaking, you know, the more empowered people can be with these tools and, you know, actually, you know, again, at the end of the day, if it's delivering value to folks, right, and they're seeing a really, you know, a benefit to using this technology, then I'm all for it. But again, you know, yeah, there's two ways to look at it, of course.

18:08Yeah, you hit on the core thing. It's all about value at the end of the day. And we talk a lot about that at Hatchworks, delivering and owning the outcome. But it goes back to like the dot-com era. You slap dot-com on anything. The concept of value just completely got ignored. And there's some of that going on today where it's the hype train of, you know, there's a new generative AI tool out every day, multiple ones. But do they provide value? Are they defensible? Do they have some kind of differentiated mode when you can spend something up on a weekend? Probably not. Right. So I think that it's that back to first principles is still going to be true, even with this.

18:51Yeah. Right on. All right. So that is number three, the cautionary tale with generative AI tools. Number four, this is, I like this one. So this is impact to creation and utilization of design systems. For me, this gets to like easier standardization, just like mundane tasks, get them out of here. But take us through this one. Yeah, sure. And this is kind of like, you know, a click deeper to what we were talking about earlier around like, you know, developing whole concepts via prompting. So like this is more, I think, when you get into that stage of finalizing a design, right? You know, there's a lot of work that now has to be done for preparing that to be taken further in the delivery lifecycle, right?

19:35So leveraging the automation aspects of what these tools have is, I think, potentially a big kind of speed up in terms of a designer's workflow. Like if you could imagine just simply making a design and then prompting a tool to say, you know, generate the components for color typography, the focus states from what I just designed. And it's like, boom, there it is. Or, you know, take the design system, decrease all the color gradations we have by 10 percent and boom, it's all done. You don't have to go in and do all that, you know, individual legwork. So while it sounds like little stuff, all of that from the standpoint of a design team's effort can really add up and, you know, shave a lot of time.

20:18So I think this is really a powerful kind of aspect of like that latter stage of finalization design, not just within kind of like pulling components apart for the sake of delivery, but also in kind of refinement. um it's very similar i think to um you know a time when the concept of reusable symbols and components were introduced and interface design programs like sketch right like it really changed the way we as designers thought about our workflow it's like oh i can create this one component or this one symbol that i can use an infinite number of times within my design system great like you know it was a huge efficiency gain for a lot of a lot of you know people's day-to-day And again, I think like we're in, we're kind of, you know, in that moment with these tools coming to light of like, you know, how does it come into a workflow?

21:03How does it kind of shave off or make, you know, things that much easier? And I think that's, again, where like the real value and the real adoption is going to take place. So whomever in whatever fashion comes out with, you know, the killer app when it comes to like design. And again, this is why I was I was talking about Figma earlier, because a lot of the industry is kind of waiting to see, you know, what their move is when it comes to, you know, generative AI and kind of, you know, baking it into their their whole their software suite. You know, these are these are these are interesting times, you know, and it's the stuff that will impact, you know, 100 percent of how we approach, you know, our workflows as you know, as designers here at Hatchworks, too.

21:39So really interesting stuff. Really looking forward to learning more and more and kicking the tires on even more tools. Yeah. And everybody's listening. The whole summation there, it's speed to value. It's helping increase speed to value, efficiency, all of that. But for the listeners that may not be acquainted with what a design system even is, like what is a design system, gives just some context for what that is, why you have design systems, the value of them. So I think it's a piece that's kind of overlooked sometimes if you're building products and you're not as acquainted with user experience, UI design, things like that.

22:21Yeah. So, I mean, at its core, a design system is really kind of the foundations of what makes up the visualization or the interaction, interactive elements of your product, your solution, whatever it is that you're designing. Right. So, you know, you can think about there's kind of the atomic method of breaking things down to the atomic level of like, this is our, you know, our very small elements that build up into molecules that build up into organisms, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So, you know, having a system of all of those components within your design is really, again, the foundational part.

22:55And, you know, I can, as a designer or someone who owns that design system for a specific product or a brand, you know, shepherd that and work through, okay, do we need to make updates to colors? Do we make updates to our typography suite? All of that kind of thing. You know, those are the nitty gritty pieces that all kind of, you know, again, funnel back up to what you see in the final interaction, the final interface. So, again, that's why, like, you know, there's a lot of, you know, components to design systems that need to be managed and overseen. And, you know, again, with these AI tools coming to light, there's a lot of opportunity for a lot more efficiency to be interjected into that whole workflow.

23:31So, yeah. Yeah. And I think to your point, what's going to be interesting, at least what I'm interested in, is it going to be your Figma's, you know, obviously your Adobe's, the large players. are they going to adapt to these things and when in the market or you are you going to have smaller players uh this is like a figma like they have a mode established people are bought in and they use that solution you know are new players going to be able to come in by advancing and kind of leapfrogging here or the you know plugging into those type of solutions do you think it is going to be kind of the big players out there that ultimately win they may take a little more time to actually build this into their solutions?

24:17Or do you think it's more of a newcomer space? Yeah, I mean, yeah, the established players definitely have a leg up, right? Like especially Figma, who now has Adobe in their corner, right? So they have the resource to push this stuff through more quickly. You know, but that's not to say that a new player couldn't come out of left field and really nail all of the core value prop that, you know, a Figma does and add on top of it with something related to generative AI and beat them to the punch. I mean, it's completely feasible. You know, and there are groups out there, you know, I've seen Buzzy.

24:51I've seen U-Wizard, all these kinds of things that are, you know, they are their own ecosystems. But like, you know, maybe this is the time that a new player comes out and takes the crown. I don't know. Yeah, I guess we look back as far as Figma. Or, you know, they're a little bit older, but they definitely came in and just stole the show. All right. So that is number four, the impact in creating and utilizing design systems. It's going to be big there. It's getting rid of all the mundane tasks that designers really, they can focus on more important stuff. The last one, this is, you know, I mentioned the POC one is the most impactful, but this one's critical.

25:34I love this one. It's the importance of keeping your users actively engaged when they're in co-pilot mode so they don't crash the plane. What does this mean? And this is thinking about the users of generative AI or your products and services that leverage generative AI. Take us to this one. Right. Yeah, I love this notion. I think it's like, you know, this idea of, oh, generative AI is just going to allow us to just prompt, do whatever, and then kind of go about our day and do the really important things. But I think it's really more kind of an opportunity for us as practitioners to be diligent.