05 / 2024

Integrating Human Creativity with AI in UX Design

Susan Yang RGD, Creative Director at Padometric Studio shares AI-powered tools that can complement various stages in your UX design process.

AI as an assistant in your UX design process provides opportunities to streamline workflows and boost efficiency while allowing you to focus more on creative problem-solving, strategy and empathy-driven design. AI tools can help UX by making it easier to handle data-driven insights at scale, help automate repetitive tasks, address the web accessibility gap, improve user experiences, and customize more precise personalization.

Integrating AI tools is a balanced mindful approach to maximize the benefits of AI while retaining creative control. The core of UX design will always be deeply rooted in empathy to create experiences that resonate with users. AI tools cannot replace emotional intelligence but can be viewed as a cooperative relationship to help your workflow, giving you more time to dedicate to the strategic and creative aspects.

By exploring AI tools judiciously, you can learn how AI can work for you, which ones align to your work style, to help complement your creative process and enhance efficiency. Below are some example AI tools to consider incorporating into your toolkit in the different stages of the UX design process.

AI Tools for Research

User research plays an important role as it provides invaluable insights to align UX with user expectations. With the aid of AI tools, they can help overcome limited resources, streamline repetitive activities and expedite for quicker access to data and insights.

1. AI Tool: Miro Assist (Watch video)

2. AI Tool: Notably x Miro (Read article)

3. AI Tool: Maze AI (Read article)

AI Tools for Ideation

Good UX design is rooted in the ideation process which includes brainstorming, problem-solving, and concept development. AI tools can be leveraged to inspire and stimulate creative thinking for quick ideation.

1. AI Tool: FigJam AI (Watch video)

2. AI Tool: Notion AI (Watch video)

3. AI Tool: ChatGPT (Watch video)

AI Tools for Design

Integrating use of AI tools in your design workflow will help achieve greater efficiency and collaboration. Features in these AI tools include transforming screenshots into editable UI mockups, generating wireframes from sketches, and providing UX review for improvements.

1. AI Tool: Figma (Watch video)

2. AI Tool: UX Pilot x Figma (See Guide)

3. AI Tool: Uizard (Watch video)

AI Tools for Content

For content design, AI tools for UX writing provides help in speeding up the copy creation process. AI-driven content design tools are useful as a writing assistant by making copy suggestions from which you can be inspired for your own versions.

1. AI Tool: Frontitude (Watch video)

2. AI Tool: Grammarly (Watch video)

3. AI Tool: Jasper (Watch video)

AI Tools for Colours/Fonts

As part of your UX design workflow, AI tools can help simplify the process of selecting colors by generating colour palettes through training, finding colour combinations, and creating font pairings with deep learning.

1. AI Tool: Khroma

2. AI Tool: Fontjoy

3. AI Tool: Colormind

AI Tools for Images

AI tools that generate images from text can be beneficial in the early phases of ideation and visual exploration. Practical usage of these AI tools with detailed prompts can encompass moodboards and various visual formats.

1. AI Tool: Stable Diffusion (Watch video)

2. AI Tool: Midjourney (See Guide)

3. AI Tool: Adobe Firefly (Watch video)

AI Tools for Accessibility

As an aid to speed up identifying accessibility issues, AI tools can include features such as ability to recognize images and generate alt text, to scan and analyze colour schemes, and to access and remediate multiple page states.

1. AI Tool: accessWidget (Watch video)

2. AI Tool: UserWay (Watch video)

3. AI Tool: axe DevTools (Watch video)

AI Tools for Development

To improve productivity, AI tools for front-end code can aid with suggestions for code solutions, bug fixing, and fewer browser searches. These tools can provide coders a helping hand with iterative tasks, enable multi-tasking, and offer test units, allowing more time for the coder to solve tasks creatively.

1. AI Tool: GitHub Copilot (Watch video)

2. AI Tool: OpenAI Codex (Watch video)

3. AI Tool: Tabnine (Watch video)