AI is an inevitable part of our workflow. I am not going to dive into the question of whether AI is going to replace designers—I have covered this topic in my previous article. This time, I want you to become best friends with top AI tools.

If you still ask yourself how to use it in your daily design workflow, here is the answer to how to make your first steps.

Artificial Intelligence is more than Generative AI

In recent years, we have started to perceive AI through the lenses of tools like ChatGPT or Midjourney.

The Artificial Intelligence is the entire science discipline. It is already present in many tools, and you might not have noticed it yet. It’s not only about chatting or generating images. Some research tools can categorize the responses, highlight key moments, and summarize the sessions.

Keep in mind that Generative AI, even if the entire world is looking at its development right now, is just a small subset.

Just start using AI

If you haven’t had the opportunity to play with the tool, it’s time to start. Start with ChatGPT, the most popular tool in this area. It is very universal and super intuitive to begin with.

Think of ChatGPT as a conversation with your freelance junior design buddy. Start using it for fun & experiments. See how it answers your questions.

My recommendation, and the first pro tip, is that when you write the prompt (prompt is the instruction for AI), you need to be far more precise than just writing one sentence like:

“Prepare a research plan for a fintech mobile app from Dubai.”

This prompt will give us only a generic answer. I am not sure if it will be useful in daily work:

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A successful ChatGPT prompt needs to consider the following things:

1. Task description - what you want AI to do
2. Context - everything AI should know about why you ask for this specific task
3. Goal - what you want to achieve thanks to the task
4. Format - how AI should present it (the list, article, single paragraph, etc)

You may obviously ask for a lot more things like tone of voice or ask Chat to behave like a specific persona, but the above is enough to get much better results.

In our example, a better prompt would look like this:

“I am preparing a usability testing scenario for a fintech app for Dubai. Testing will focus on figuring out the issues of the new onboarding process. Prepare the list of 10 questions to ask participants about their expectations for creating an account & onboarding. Add ideas for 5 tasks for the participants that they may perform on the prototype. The prototype includes following steps to create an account:

1. Provide name
2. Provide phone number
3. KYC - scan your Emirates ID
4. Select the plan (free, premium, VIP)
5. Order the card (with choice of the image).”

Here is the screenshot with the results. See how well-defined context and goal allows AI to give us much useful answers:

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Beware of AI limitations

The example above demonstrates the good side of using AI. When you start interacting with AI you will quickly get amazed by the answers. However, it is necessary to learn about things that does not work well yet.

Hallucinations - Tools like ChatGPT can sometimes provide incorrect information in its answers, known as hallucinations. These are challenging to identify because GPT delivers them with the same certainty as accurate information.

Bias - All answers are based on the data model that was trained; they may represent specific stereotypes or be outdated.

Regulations & Law - AI is a young discipline, and there are many ongoing discussions about ownership or copyrights to the content produced by Artificial Intelligence. When attempting to use the tool, always check the Terms & conditions.

For example, Midjourney-generated images do not have any copyrights, so everyone may use them freely.

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Where AI may help designers

How AI may help us in daily design work. Here are a few tasks that AI may do for you:

• Prepare research - ask it for data, statistics and benchmarking
• Brainstorm ideas - think of it as your junior design partner; you may ask to generate ideas of solving user problems, but always use your expert lenses to verify them
• Prepare ideas for Usability Testing - from scenarios, questions to prototype flows
• Generate placeholder images - tools like Midjourney may quickly generate high-quality visual content for you
• Synthesize usability research - if you have a lot data to process, ask AI to find correlations or summarize pain points
• Improve the copy - AI won’t replace the best UX Writers, but it may give us a good hint to improve the text content

What to avoid

I see many posts on social media, that shows that AI tools like ChatGPT may generate user personas, or user flows but... if they are not based on real data, they are completely useless.

Every decision you make in design should have foundation with good design practices and the users behaviors, not hallucinations of the tool.

Avoid relying blindly on the data produced by AI, especially if you ask to create fake personas or user research results.

Continue mastering the top tools.

Once you start your journey with the first tool like ChatGPT, don’t stop there. There are many AI solutions appearing every day, but the ones I list below are especially useful for design purposes:

• Perplexity - Chat-based solution, but it sticks a lot more to the real content. It also provides links to the sources by default.
• Midjourney - the most famous image generation model. Provides great results with simple prompts, but when you master advanced techniques its a great source of inspiration.
• Galileo - You enter the prompt, and Galileo creates a design or series of designs based on known patterns. It may produce mobile & web designs and then allow you to iterate on the results.
• Relume - something for Figma & Webflow lovers. Relume allows you to generate a sitemap with a prompt and then turn it into wireframes based on a collection of hundreds of sections included in their library. Once done, the generated design may be opened in Figma.

And if you are curious how to use it all in the end-to-end design process I have got something that may interest you. AI for Design is the course that I am building to allow designers achieve amazing results with AI as their partners that speeds up almost every part of design process.

Sounds promising? Sign up to my newsletter, to stay updated about the progress.

Summing up

AI became a real work companion. It may support us to increase efficiency and productivity when accomplishing daily tasks.

It’s worth to explore it’s possibilities as every day brings a next step forward and new features.

Start exploring, good luck!

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