Choosing optimism in a future of design and AI

It’s scary to be a designer right now. Here's how I stay optimistic.

So far in Detach Instance, I’ve covered the frameworks to help early product designers achieve success in their careers by choosing their employer, standing out during interviews, and developing core design skills. I’ll be taking a quick break next week to prepare for part two of this arc on design careers. I’ve asked six amazing designers to share their unique career journeys and learnings over the years.

Our first interview features my friend and senior designer at Chime, a fee-free banking app that’s helping over 8 million American account holders build their credit scores. I’ll be back the first week of May—stay tuned!

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Tech’s appetite for product design this past year has been particularly fickle. We went from flourishing UX bootcamp businesses to layoffs across the entire tech market. Now, OpenAI has released ChatGPT, an AI tool that has people worried about being replaced by a machine.

It’s scary to be a designer right now. Our jobs can already be difficult, mentally and emotionally, so it’s easy to feel pessimistic that we’ll be replaced by an AI bot. I don’t know what the future of design looks like nor how to control it, but I know we can control how we approach the future. We can choose to feel pessimistic that the demise of the designer is near or optimistic that AI will enhance the role of a designer.

I choose optimism, here’s how:

An upgraded toolkit to do more, faster

Can you imagine never upgrading our UX tooling past Photoshop? We can incorporate AI as naturally as we’ve graduated from Photoshop to Figma and Framer.

New tools don’t mean lost skills. When Figma introduced auto-layout, designers didn’t suddenly stop knowing how to create effective layouts. Even though AI might start making our design components for us, we’ll still need our taste and skills to make an experience good. Plus, the time saved from building components can go towards learning about AI and designing for a new world of AI-driven products. Here are some tools that I’m excited to try:

• Genius.diagram: an AI partner in my Figma file so that I can build faster

• Uizard: a tool that generates high fidelity mocks so I can do more concept generation and storytelling

• VisualEyes.ai: a research tool to get immediate usability feedback so I can spend time understanding how users really feel

New opportunities in current design patterns

The most basic version of ChatGPT has been available to the public for less than half a year. Extrapolating based on how excited people are about this technology, we’ve barely scratching the surface of what AI will impact. Since models are trained on text data, it makes sense we’ve mostly seen AI in the context of chat-based interfaces. With time, these mediums will increase and we’ll have to expand our current set of design patterns to host new functionality and capabilities. Here are some to chew on:

• the reinvention of a search box that doesn’t just match keywords, but actually understands what you’re looking for

• more sophisticated design patterns that make it easy for people to interact with images and parts of images

• the entire system of sound, haptics, UI and more when wearables can trigger unique functionality based on nuanced human movement

A new age of opinionated products

Until now, a majority of software has been un-opinionated. You can ask it to automate repetitive tasks and manipulate complex objects, but it won’t tell you what to automate or manipulate. That was the job of the thought-forming human brain.

Some products like Noom, the psychology-based weight control app, and Duolingo, the gamified language learning app, have taken an opinionated stance. They lead users through focused experiences to reach end goals, like losing weight or learning a new language, instead of intermediary goals, like researching diet plans and cross-referencing textbooks. There are relatively few products like this because they’re risky and hard to build, requiring human research and time. Something like OpenAI affords us access to all the data, allowing us to build highly customized products very quickly. Consider the opinionated AI-driven products that we could build now, like

• A messaging platform that helps you to communicate more effectively for different audiences

• A product design tool that lets you build experiences from user journeys and evidence-backed design decisions

• A documentation tool that chooses what to document and how to help a specific team move forward more efficiently and effectively

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The future of design is uncertain, and it always has been. We’re so engrossed in our work and careers, sometimes we forget how volatile tech is as an industry. It was less than 10 years ago that we started calling ourselves product designers! AI is yet another new and exciting technology adding to this evolving industry. I’m choosing to be optimistic about the future of design. What makes you optimistic?

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For those of you new here, it’s great to have you and I’m letting you know that I offer design mentorship via Superpeer. For the rest of April, you can get 25% off any of my programs using the code DETACHINSTANCE. I also offer free design mentorship to students and folks in financially tenuous situations via ADPList. Let me support you on your design career journey.