In the last couple years Artificial Intelligence has taken the world by storm, starting to revolutionize the tech industry in many aspects, including UX. AI can help UX designers to automate some routine tasks that take a lot of time, providing more space for creativity and product quality improvement. It’s not likely that AI might replace human designers in the near future, but it can definitely ease the work of designers in some ways.
Let’s discuss how AI can be applied in UX Design these days:
Analyzing large volumes of data
A huge part of UX designers’ work involves analyzing a lot of user data, including engagement, page visits, surveys and a lot more. Doing this manually takes a lot of time and slows down the working process, making the designers perform dull routine tasks. That’s where AI can help: it can be used to gather, analyze, summarize, categorize, or even predict data that will then be used by designers to make the product more user-oriented.
Analyzing prototypes and testing stats
AI can’t help create full-fledged prototypes or conduct user testing on its own yet, but it can help UX designers to perform these tasks quicker and easier. For example, it can identify some patterns of user behavior, predict some possible scenarios of the way users might interact with the product, and summarize feedback info.
Generating UX copy
UX copy is the words or phrases on the screen that help users navigate through the product. With the help of certain AI tools, UX designers can generate copy optimized for a specific product, or get context-based suggestions that help write more meaningful and eye-catching texts without wasting hours on thinking how to better put ideas into words.
Generating user personas
User persona is a fictional user of a certain product created on the basis of the data about it’s average target audience. AI tools can analyze this data and help designers create more precise user personas. They can also collect info on what potential users want, need and expect from the product - for example, by analyzing posts, surveys, etc.
Creating small details
While AI is not able to create a full design from scratch, it can be used to make small details, leaving UX designers a space to focus on more large and significant parts of the working process. Some AI tools can generate logos, icons, buttons, and other small elements of the design. Others can help choose the best colour palette for the product based on its description.
Helping find new ideas
UX design process might not always go smoothly, and even the most professional and hard-working designers might experience burnout, lack of ideas and the so-called "paralysis of creativity". That's where AI can also come in handy: it can help designers generate new ideas or help visualize their ideas. It doesn't mean AI will do the work for you, but it can definitely serve as a source of inspiration that helps form the basis for the creative process.
Serving as an educational tool for novice designers
There are, obviously, a lot of educational sources and materials that you can use when you start making your first steps in UX design. But AI can also be useful there: it can help you quickly find necessary information, explain some moments that you find hard to comprehend, suggest some educational books/tools/platforms that you should try.
Things you should be aware of when using AI in UX
As much as AI can help UX designers and make their work easier, it comes with it's cons which you should be aware of in order not to ruin your project. Here are some of them:
Too much automation
AI can be great at providing information and generating ideas, but relying too heavily on it can lead to getting over-automated, inanimate design that won’t be pleasing to use. Remember that any software product is designed for humans, so it requires human touch. It's okay to use AI as a helping tool there, but be sure to bring a life into every generated idea you use.
AI hallucinations/imperfections
Not a single AI tool is perfect yet, and one of their main problems is hallucinations, which is generating false information. It's always necessary to manually check everything that AI generates, as well as to make sure there are no imperfections on images that it makes.
Privacy issues
If you use AI to analyze user data, please make sure it is done in a correct way and the privacy of information is protected. Do not use bots and models that don't have proper privacy regulations, as well as don't put out users' data anywhere without their concent.
Conclusion
If used correctly and moderately, AI can serve as a great tool for creating a modern, user-oriented and qualitative UX design that will enhance user experience within the product. It's not necessary to use AI on every step of the UX design process, but it can be of great help in the moments when you have to automate repetitive routine tasks or generate new design ideas.
