There has been a dramatic shift in the market, which I as a consultant have definitely personally felt. Hiring contractors is almost a thing of the past, which is understandable, you can get so far with the help of AI now that you might think “why do I need a UX/UI Designer?”. And the oversupply of applicants for every single job seems to be lowering prices and also favoring just hiring someone full-time more cheaply.
When you ask the AI to make a UI for you, most of the time it makes a decent UI which is functionally as complete as you asked it to be. It has no problem adding any sort of feature that adds the ability to achieve a function you want. It will even place the UI for that feature in a reasonable spot. That doesn’t mean it will be easy for your users to use.
However, when you dig deeper you can’t simply ask it to “make the UX better”, that’s like asking the designers to “make it pop”. The AI doesn’t have a true understanding of “better UX”, it understands the patterns that are used to make a UI, it can talk about UX theoretically, and knows what a UI consists of, but when it comes to making it fundamentally better for humans, it falls short.
You still need a designer
Understanding what makes a good UI and a good user experience is the only way to build it. For someone not experienced in it, it will always be sub-par.
Recently I worked with a company that was deep in the AI world, literally training their own AI, but they had a lot of user experience issues on the front-end (case study coming soon). They had a very smart and eager junior designer, but there are just some things you learn by doing things over and over again over many years.
What I believe will happen in the future to try to fix it
What I envision, which will probably completely remove my job, is that AI makers will start to pattern match user experience for particular needs. This will cover 80% of use-cases, but some old designers will still be there filling the gap.
I don’t see this becoming a perfect solution, since every product and UI is generally unique, even though they may be similar, there are always differences which you can’t always just pattern-match a solution to.
Not that different from using AI to code products
Vibe coding is the new trend and everybody seems to be on that bandwagon, myself included. But it’s those who have a fundamentally good understanding of how to build products that will really use this new tool to the max.
For me, this has been an amazing boost, since I’m already an experienced designer and developer, this makes me feel like I’m unstoppable when it comes to producing work. Coding has always been a means to an end for me. The real work is building products to enable people to solve problems. That’s it, the code is a tool to get that. AI increases that productivity massively.
Conclusion
So far I’m loving the productivity boost it gives me when implementing my designs. I have always designed and coded, and I always loved coding, seeing my designs become a real functioning product is an amazing feeling that I have had the luxury of feeling countless times. But sometimes big parts of the coding were just tedious to implement because it’s just not particularly groundbreaking work, more like linking a lot of things together, while I just want to see the results already. It doesn’t involve any investigation or intrigue because I already know exactly how to do it, so now I can just explain to the AI what I want and iterate on it until it works exactly how I want it to.
Additional reading
https://blog.mozilla.ai/when-shipping-becomes-too-easy/?ref=gilli