August 8, 2023

5 Ways Generative AI Will Change the Way You Think About UX and UI Design

Generative AI has taken the world by storm. In a short space of time, it has changed the way many people do their work. For UX and UI designers, it has the potential to change the entire design process – but how? 

In this episode of Built Right, host Matt Paige sits down with HatchWorks’ Andy Silvestri, Director of Product Design, to break down the five main ways generative AI will change the way we think about UX and UI design. 

Keep reading for the top takeaways or tune in to the episode below.  

We’ve identified five main ways generative AI could impact the design process – all the way from those early stages of design to the final product.  

 

1. A shift from an imperative to a declarative design

One way that UX and UI design have changed is that there has been a shift from an imperative, or point-and-click style of design, to a more declarative approach.  

Now, you can declare what you want from a tool, and it will work toward a solution. This allows you to work with what Andy calls a “design copilot,” which could result in machines reading a design brief or refining a narrative. A declarative approach is essentially a dialogue you have with a machine, which has the potential to be a game-changer in the design space, especially for smaller teams with limited resources.

 

2. Getting to proof of concept quicker 

Another way generative AI could change the way we design UX is by allowing design teams to reach a proof of concept much faster. In the ideation phase, design teams will typically grind out multiple iterations of flows, wireframes, and other elements to support a proof of concept.  

But AI tools could shave time off for designers. It could also allow them to explore different ideas in those early phases without needing to spend a large amount of time drawing them up.  

 

3. Exercise caution while using generative AI 

While generative AI can save time and refine the design process, it’s still important to be cautious while using it. Using AI tools will still require designers to check the quality, assess for bias, inaccuracies, or even copyright infringements. 

That’s why human designers aren’t going to be fully replaced by AI anytime soon. We still need human eyes to check for these things. Common issues with generative AI in the design process include shadows, angles, depth of field, and proportions looking “off.” But it will take a human to spot them. 

 

4. Impact on creation and utilization of design systems 

Generative AI can also help in the later stages of the design process by speeding up workflows and helping to finalize designs. For example, you could take the design system and ask it to decrease all color gradations by 10% – which then takes some of the more manual work out of tweaking designs.  

By making the design process more efficient from those early ideation stages to finalizing the designs, designers are freed up to spend more of their time on other elements of the process.

 

5. Keeping users engaged 

Andy believes generative AI will give practitioners a chance to be more diligent in the process. Designers can spend more time thinking about the thing that’s most important in UX and UI design – creating an all-round good experience for users.  

Getting feedback from users and acting on that feedback is still essential, which is why human designers are still so crucial to the process. As of yet, AI can’t really assess a design for value, efficiency and accessibility in the same way a real person could.  

Overall, generative AI has great potential to streamline elements of the design process to save time. However, designers will still need to oversee the work and adjust accordingly to ensure that the design is user-friendly and provides real value for people. 

For more information on how generative AI is changing the design process, check out the full episode.  

Excited about the possibilities of Generative AI in UX/UI design? Make sure to subscribe to the Built Right podcast for more insights and discussions like these. Share your thoughts and experiences with us. Let’s create, innovate, and elevate the world of design together! 

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[00:00:00] Matt Paige: We got a spicy one for you built right. Listeners, today we’re breaking down the five ways generative AI will change the way. You think about UX and UI design. And by the way, number two, I believe we’ll actually create a complete shift in the way we think about designing and building software. So make sure to stick around for that one.

[00:00:28] Matt Paige: But to help me do it today, I’m joined by Hatworks own Andy Sylvester. Who brings 20 years of experience in the digital design space, including graphic design, creative design, user experience, customer experience, product strategy, all the things. And he even ran his own experience strategy and design firm for 10 years prior to leading our product design practice here at Patchworks.

[00:00:53] Matt Paige: Andy’s a returning guest, so check out episode two if you like this one with Andy, but welcome back to the show, Andy.

[00:01:00] Andy Silvestri: Hey, thanks Matt. It’s good to be back.

[00:01:03] Matt Paige: Yeah, good to have you all, and I’m really excited about this topic and this format that we’re gonna get into to today. So we at patchworks have been digging into everything generative AI as of late as it relates to the world of UX and UI design specifically for this conversation.

[00:01:21] Matt Paige: From testing new tools, talking to folks in the industry. And what we’ve done is we’ve distilled all of these learnings down to. The five key points so you don’t have to and this includes how it’s making things easier, better, faster, but also what we need to watch out for. And plus things that may sound completely foreign.

[00:01:39] Matt Paige: Now we believe this is gonna be standard practice in the future, so trying to help you get ahead of that. Without further ado, Andy, let’s get into number one. So I’ll key it up for us and let you take it from there. But number one is, Taking this shift from an imperative to a declarative design approach.

[00:01:59] Matt Paige: Take us through that. What is, what does this mean and how is this going to evolve?

[00:02:04] Andy Silvestri: Yeah. So I think as practitioners, right? We’re coming from this time of you point and click in the imperative fashion of doing everything, right? And now we’re getting into this model of course, where like you can declare what you want from the tool, right?

[00:02:18] Andy Silvestri: I can say I gimme this, gimme that. And the tool will use its use, its AI powers to give you a result, right? I think that that focus on moving more into this declarative kind of approach to design is really an interesting one because that idea of working along perhaps like a design co-pilot of sorts where you have this running narrative with the generative AI tool that really has a potential to be a, pretty big game changer. And not only from the standpoint of like just a singular prompt and response where I’m like, Hey Give me a design that has this, and this, and the thing gives it to you.

[00:02:52] Andy Silvestri: But maybe more so the ability to work through like a design, brief and refining a narrative, tweaking things, adjusting things, that kind of stuff. So really like it’s this kind of dialogue you have with the machine, and yeah, seeing that as having a really big, upside to streamlining the process.

[00:03:12] Andy Silvestri: Especially for smaller teams where it’s maybe a designer of a design team of one. And. Like maybe you’re a startup, you have a smaller budget, right? So you’re really leveraging the tool as almost a again, a co-pilot or another designer on your team.

[00:03:29] Andy Silvestri: There are some tools out there that are embracing this kind of dialogue approach. When there a lot of thoughts. This stuff’s in beta right now. It would be interesting to see where this goes. We’ve seen it from like the, imagery perspective of gimme a still image or gimme illustration. But still in the sense of like screen design, there are some big players who haven’t really weighed in specifically Figma and by extension, Adobe. So it’s gonna be really interesting to see what they bring to the table.

[00:04:01] Matt Paige: Yeah it’s, really interesting. This is this one kind of, as you start to think about it, it blows my mind a bit because there’s been so many best practices established with the way we’ve done things to date.

[00:04:13] Matt Paige: There are heuristics and, some of that will still stay around. But it’s based on the human interacting with a machine in a particular way. And these generative AI tools and way of interacting with a machine via natural language it’s still got room for improvement. But I always look back to like cell phones.

[00:04:35] Matt Paige: Back in the day when we were playing snake or the internet back in the day, we were dialing up on a o l. Like, things have progressed so much. And you already see what’s happening with generative ai, how fast it’s progressing like this has the potential to really shift how we interact with technology, which really flips on its head, potentially how we’ve been doing things in a big way.

[00:04:57] Matt Paige: Date.

[00:04:58] Andy Silvestri: Yeah, a hundred percent. There’s always that kind of room for improvement, room for advancement. I think that we’re seeing that right now, in this moment with all these tools that are coming out. And you’re really the hard part, I think right now is staying on top of it.

[00:05:10] Andy Silvestri: All right. Yeah. It’s been an interesting ride for sure.

[00:05:15] Matt Paige: I think it’ll be interesting too. You think of this concept of the, innovator’s dilemma. Take a Salesforce or a HubSpot or that’s how their whole solution’s built. Most solutions today are how are they going to adapt this new way of interacting?

[00:05:31] Matt Paige: With technology do they adapt and make the shift potentially upset some existing customers, right? Yeah. To try, to stay ahead, or is it gonna be what we’ve seen so many times, newer competitors coming into the space without the bloat and that, that gets back to an interesting point you just made.

[00:05:48] Matt Paige: You may not need an army of people to do some of this stuff so that it changes the game a bit.

[00:05:55] Andy Silvestri: Yeah, it’s interesting subset of that example for what Adobe is currently doing with their AI tools, right? They’re slow rolling things into their existing product based, right?

[00:06:05] Andy Silvestri: So you’re seeing like a feature here and a feature there come into Photoshop or come into Illustrator, right? I think just today they released a. A color the modification tool piece within, the illustrator, so that’s one approach. Is like just tease it out, get a little bit of proof of concept, get a little bit of traction around something before just throwing a huge new application right in front of people.

[00:06:28] Andy Silvestri: Like kind of meet them where they are in their current workflows. Yeah. Yeah, it’s an interesting aspect of how all this stuff is coming together.

[00:06:35] Matt Paige: So that’s number one, shift from imperative point and click to more of a declarative chat focused. Design, how that’s gonna impact user experience and something to stay on top of number two.

[00:06:48] Matt Paige: And, this is the one I called out earlier. I think this is one of the most interesting ones. I think it’s the ability to get to proof of concept quicker. And some of this is obvious, but we’ve been playing around with some tools that, you know, whether it’s that tool or that concept or idea and somebody else adopts it, but there’s big potential here to really accelerate this process.

[00:07:08] Matt Paige: So take us through this one.

[00:07:10] Andy Silvestri: Yeah, this is great. And this is probably, at least in my opinion, one of the biggest upsides to at least currently using generative AI in design. And from both the standpoint of like low fidelity, medium fidelity, high fidelity all those things. I think the, idea is why not use these tools when the stakes are low, right?

[00:07:29] Andy Silvestri: If you’re in a a, a. A ideation phase or concepting phase, grinding out multiple iterations of flows, wire frames, interface concepts components, anything to support a proof of concept, it’s not really gonna be a slog anymore. Like you want to get using these tools to get directionally correct.

[00:07:49] Andy Silvestri: Correct. Will take a lot less time. And probably in a, in an interesting way people are afraid of this idea of, oh, it’s gonna replace designers completely, but I think it’s actually going to. Open up the door for designers to become even more exploratory in those early ideation and concepting processes.

[00:08:06] Andy Silvestri: Because you’re gonna have more time. ’cause you’re not necessarily doing all the heavy lift in the backend. So if, for example, I can say to a tool, Hey, I need three concepts of this, and this. Give it some requirements and, work through that prompting. And then take what it gives me and and then leverage what it’s given me to refine it further as needed. That’s a big, that’s a big step up from just, okay, I gotta make three concepts and I gotta think through every single Yeah. Every single piece. Yeah, I think this is gonna be a really big a big lift in terms of workflow.

[00:08:42] Andy Silvestri: And again, like in that earlier phase, I think is when it’s gonna be most profound in terms of just kinda saving time.

[00:08:49] Matt Paige: Yeah. You think of how we interact with our clients today, that upfront piece, like it gets shortened so much. You almost could think of this world in the future where you’re in a workshop and.

[00:09:00] Matt Paige: You’re actually getting an idea, like as, you’re working through the workshop. And then there’s the debate of, okay, the is whiteboards still superior because if you start to get real looking designs, the discussion immediately shifts to color and placement and not the, core functional piece of things.

[00:09:23] Matt Paige: And I think that’s

[00:09:24] Andy Silvestri: where like kind. Yeah, like the tactful use of those tools in those scenarios, I think is what’s gonna be paramount, right? Because you can think about that of yeah, we might be going through and doing a workshop, getting some stuff on the whiteboard with a client.

[00:09:37] Andy Silvestri: We come back and we say, okay give us a week to turn around some, rough proofs of concept that might be, let’s do it right now with what we just ideated through and see what we can get. But of course, like to your point, leveraging it at the fidelity that makes the most sense, so that, yeah, you don’t jump too far ahead or get down a rabbit hole and get.

[00:09:54] Andy Silvestri: Kind of distracted from like the discovery task at hand, right? But, yeah that’s a really, that’s a really good way to think about it. Of let’s put the concept and let’s create like the artifact for it much more in a much lighter lift and, use that to further the conversation.

[00:10:11] Andy Silvestri: So that’s what I mean by getting it getting quicker and getting getting to the concept and, getting it out the door in an efficient manner.

[00:10:20] Matt Paige: Yeah. And you mentioned 1.2. So it’s two things in, my view. I’ve heard some others express this too. The minimum bar is gonna be raised or lowered in, in whichever way you look at it in terms of it’s gonna be so much easier to do stuff, right?

[00:10:39] Matt Paige: But I think to your point, it elevates. The true practitioners, the true designers that skillset, it’s like back to the back to the Renaissance it’s the artist. It’s those folks that start to become more empowered, and I think that’s, the future. Is those type of folks become even more important, critically important as this new technology starts to take, shape.

[00:11:05] Andy Silvestri: Yeah, for sure. A hundred percent.

[00:11:09] Matt Paige: So that’s number two, getting to this proof of concept quicker. Multiple iterations of proof of concept testing. That whole idea of the agile mindset, it just accelerates things. But getting to number three, this is more of the cautionary tailwind.

[00:11:25] Matt Paige: So exercise caution when leveraging generative AI tools and solutions. So take us through the the more doomsday one on the list here.

[00:11:36] Andy Silvestri: Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is a good one to think about in that it highlights the need for cur curation, I think like now more than ever.

[00:11:46] Andy Silvestri: And I mean that from the sense that it’s not just about proofing the quality of what comes back from these tools proofing for bias, proofing for inaccuracies copyright infringements been in a lot of the conversation around using. Some of these tools, right?

[00:12:00] Andy Silvestri: There’s still a very real need, I think, for a designer’s eye to want going back to what you just saying about the, nce, right? There’s still a need for this skillset. And we will still need to employ, I think, a very good bit of common sense when we’re using these tools, right?

[00:12:17] Andy Silvestri: Like right now, whenever we are looking through things that we see in the space that are generated via ai, there’s a bit of a tell or like a look and feel. That I think this imagery is taking on, right? Like maybe there’s odd angles. The shadows are off, depth of field is not quite right.

[00:12:32] Andy Silvestri: Proportions are weird, the thing I think about, it’s like when when Photoshop became more mainstream and Photoshopped turned into a verb. Like you could tell that something had been photoshopped, right? And I think people that have been doing this for a while are seeing that kind of tell of oh, AI is, doing this and something’s not quite right.

[00:12:54] Andy Silvestri: I. That’s one way to think about it. I think, I guess the scary thing is just in what we’ve seen in the last couple months of this this stuff becoming mainstream is how good will it get, right? If you see the increase in quality that just a few months of since Chad T p D dropped the market, right?

[00:13:11] Andy Silvestri: And there’s this increased focus on more sophisticated prompting and prompt engineering is becoming like a real thing and people are learning more about how to use these tools and interact with them. So very soon, like very, soon, That tell may be indiscernible from reality. So that’s the one thing that’s okay, let’s use curation.

[00:13:30] Andy Silvestri: Let’s let’s curate this. Let’s, make sure that we are using a bit of common sense. And, maybe that goes into how we actually, I. Disseminate the work in an honest fashion, right? Somehow indicating that this was used this was made using AI tools to, help with the design, that kind of thing.

[00:13:48] Andy Silvestri: So it’s very interesting times. We’re still in that gray area, right? But I think that with, good practice, we’ll get there.

[00:13:57] Matt Paige: Yeah. And there’s, gonna be instances we saw recently. This is more chat, G p T focus, but the lawyer that was creating a legal brief off of chat G P T, and it just, it completely hallucinated just completely false information.

[00:14:12] Matt Paige: And what does that begin to look like on more of the design side? I think that’ll be interesting to see, to your point does it look like it’s been produced through generative ai? Is that a negative connotation there. But you, mentioned it earlier, it’s this concept of co-pilot that’s, the important piece.

[00:14:32] Matt Paige: It’s your co-pilot. It’s not set it and forget it. What was the, was that the George Foreman Grill back in the day? The SA or one of those? Yeah, something

[00:14:40] Andy Silvestri: like that. Yeah. Yeah, but you said it it’s interesting, right? Just as like Photoshop coming to the masses, allowed a lot more people to.

[00:14:52] Andy Silvestri: Manipulate their imagery and quite frankly do better work with the types of photos they were taking. This is a similar kind of effect where it’s not all bad, right? Just because something has been AIed doesn’t necessarily mean Yeah. That it’s going to be a bad thing for just to, again, access.

[00:15:08] Andy Silvestri: Raising that baseline, getting more people into design, getting familiar with the tools. I think that’s a a silver lining to this kind of cautionary doom and gloom outlook to AI replacing jobs and things like that. Again, very interesting taking the good with the bad, but we’ll see where it goes.

[00:15:25] Matt Paige: So, this generative AI kind of de democratizing AI and potentially design related things, good or bad, in your opinion.

[00:15:36] Andy Silvestri: I think it’s a good thing, right? I think the more we as society can get better with the tools of course there’s always a negative side to, new technology and there’s people that are gonna Yeah.

[00:15:49] Andy Silvestri: Use it for bad actors, negative things and bad actors. Yeah. All that stuff’s gonna happen. But I think generally speaking the more empowered people can be with these tools and actually again, at the end of the day, if it’s delivering value to folks right, and they’re seeing a really.

[00:16:03] Andy Silvestri: And a, benefit to using this technology, then I’m all for it. But again yeah there’s, two ways to look at it, of course. So

[00:16:12] Matt Paige: yeah you, hit on the core thing. It’s, all about value at the end of the day, and we talk a lot about that at Patchworks delivering and owning the outcome, but It, goes back to the.com era, you slap.com on anything.

[00:16:27] Matt Paige: The concept of value just completely got ignored. And there’s some of that going on today where it’s the hype train of there’s a new generative AI tool out every day, multiple ones. But do they provide value? Are they defensible? Do they have some kind of differentiated mo. When you can spend something up on a weekend, probably not.

[00:16:47] Matt Paige: So I think that it’s, that back to first principles is still gonna hold true even with this. Yeah.

[00:16:55] Andy Silvestri: Right on.

[00:16:57] Matt Paige: Alright, so that is number three, the cautionary Tale with generative AI tools. Number four this is a, I like this one. So this is impact to creation and utilization of design systems.

[00:17:11] Matt Paige: For me, this gets, to like easier standardization, just like mundane tasks. Get ’em outta here, but take us through this one.

[00:17:19] Andy Silvestri: Yeah, sure. And this is a click deeper to what we were talking about earlier around developing whole concepts via prompting. So like this is more I think when you get into that stage of finalizing a design there’s a lot of work that now has to be done for preparing that to be taken further in the delivery lifecycle, right? So leveraging the automation aspects of what these tools have is. I think potentially a, big kind of speed up in terms of a designer’s workflow, right?

[00:17:51] Andy Silvestri: If you could imagine just simply making a design and then prompting a, tool to say generate the components for color typography. The focus states from what, I just designed. And it’s boom, there it is. Or take the design system, decrease all the color radiations we have by 10%, and boom, it’s all done.

[00:18:10] Andy Silvestri: You don’t have to go in and do all that, individual legwork. So while it sounds like little stuff, all of that from the standpoint of a a design team’s effort can, really add up and, shave a lot of time. So I think this is really a, powerful kind of aspect of that, ladder stage of finalization design.

[00:18:29] Andy Silvestri: Not just within like pulling components apart for the sake of delivery, but also in kind of refinement It’s very similar, I think to a time when the concept of reusable symbols and components were introduced in interface design. Yeah. Programs like Sketch, right? Like it really changed the way we as designers thought about our workflow.

[00:18:49] Andy Silvestri: It’s oh, I can create this one component or this one symbol that I can use an infinite number of times within my design system. Great. It was a huge efficiency gain for a lot of people’s day to day. And again, I think like we’re in. We’re in that moment with these tools coming to light of how does it come into a workflow?

[00:19:08] Andy Silvestri: How does it shave off or make you know, things that much easier? And I think that’s again, where like the real value and the real adoption’s gonna take place. So whomever in whatever fashion comes out with the killer app when it comes to design, again, this is why I was talking about Figma earlier.

[00:19:23] Andy Silvestri: ’cause a lot of the industry is waiting to see what their move is when it comes to. Generative AI and baking it into their, whole their software suite. These are interesting times and it’s, the stuff that will impact a hundred percent of how we approach our workflows as as designers here at hatworks too.

[00:19:45] Andy Silvestri: Really interesting stuff, really looking forward to learning more and kicking the tires on even more tools. Yeah. And

[00:19:52] Matt Paige: Everybody that’s listening. The whole summation there, it’s speed to value, right? It’s helping increase speed to value, efficiency, all of that.

[00:20:01] Matt Paige: But for the listeners that may not be acquainted with what, a design system even is, like what’s, what is a design system gives just some some context for what that is, why you have design systems, the value of them. So I think it’s a piece that’s overlooked sometimes. If you’re building product and you’re not as acquainted with user experience UI design, things like

[00:20:26] Andy Silvestri: that.

[00:20:27] Andy Silvestri: Yeah. So at its core, a design system is really the foundations of what makes up the the visualization or the interaction interactive elements of your product, your solution, whatever it is that you’re designing, right? You can think about there’s the atomic method of breaking things down to the atomic level of this is our our, very small elements that build up into molecules that build up into organisms, et cetera, et cetera. Having a system of all those components within your design is, really again, the foundational part. And I can, as a designer or someone who owns that design system for a specific product or a brand shepherd that and, work through, okay, do we need to make updates to colors?

[00:21:13] Andy Silvestri: Do we make, updates to our typography suite? All of that kind of thing. Those are the nitty gritty pieces that all you know, again, funnel back up to what in the final interaction, the final interface. So again, that’s why there’s a lot of components to design systems that need to be managed and overseen.

[00:21:30] Andy Silvestri: And again with, these AI tools coming to light, There’s a lot of opportunity for a lot more efficiency to, be interjected into that whole workflow. Yeah.

[00:21:40] Matt Paige: Yeah, and I think to your point, what’s gonna be interesting, at least what I’m interested in, is it gonna be your Figma obviously your Adobe’s the, large players.

[00:21:53] Matt Paige: Are they going to adapt to these things and win in the market, or are you gonna have smaller players? This is like a Figma, like they have a moat. Established people are. Bought in and they use that solution are, new players gonna be able to come in by advancing and kinda leapfrogging here, or the plugging into those type of solutions?

[00:22:15] Matt Paige: Do you think it, it is gonna be the big players out there that ultimately win, it may take a little more time to actually build this into their solutions, or do you think it’s more of a, newcomer.

[00:22:27] Andy Silvestri: Space. Yeah. Yeah. The established players definitely have a leg up, right? Especially Figma, who now has Adobe in their corner, right?

[00:22:35] Andy Silvestri: So they have the resource to push this stuff through more quickly. They got the money but that’s not to, that’s not to say that a, new player couldn’t come out of left field and really nail all of the core value prop that a Figma does and add on top of it with something related to generative AI and beat them to the punch.

[00:22:52] Andy Silvestri: Yeah. It’s completely feasible. And there are groups out there I’ve seen buzzy I’ve seen you wizard, all these kinds of things that are they are their own ecosystems, but maybe, this is maybe, this is the time that a new player comes out and takes the crown.

[00:23:09] Andy Silvestri: I don’t know.

[00:23:11] Matt Paige: Yeah. I, guess we look back as far as Figma and they, yeah. Or they’re, a little bit older, but they definitely came in and just. Stole the show. Alright, so that is number four. The impact in, in creating and utilizing design systems. It’s gonna be big there. It’s getting, rid of all the mundane kinda tasks that designers really they can focus on more important stuff.

[00:23:34] Matt Paige: The last one, this is I mentioned the, p o c one is the most impactful, but this one’s critical. I, love this one. It’s the importance of keeping your users actively engaged. When they’re in copilot mode so they don’t crash the plane. What, does this mean? And this is thinking about the users of Generat generative ai, or your products and services that leverage generative ai.

[00:23:59] Matt Paige: Take us through this one.

[00:24:01] Andy Silvestri: Yeah. And I love this notion. I, think it’s I. This idea of, oh, generative AI is just gonna allow us to just prompt, do whatever and then go about our day and do the really important things when, but I think it’s really more kind of an opportunity for us as practitioners to be diligent.

[00:24:20] Andy Silvestri: And I think quite frankly, this is why I think we’ll always have jobs as designers because even with the assistance of generative ai all of these potential big wins we’ve talked about in terms of automation. A human is still responsible for creating a good experience for other humans, right?

[00:24:40] Andy Silvestri: You, have to factor in what it is that other people want in a service of product, right? And, make sure that you’re delivering on that. So no matter how quickly or efficiency or efficiently you get there you still have to test concepts. You still have to gather feedback from real people.

[00:24:56] Andy Silvestri: You have to synthesize that feedback. You have to act upon the feedback, put it into a roadmap, work on it, right? I think generally one way to think about it is that just ’cause we have all these tools that are taking the place, you know of, other humans, you’re not going to take the human out of human-centered design, right?

[00:25:14] Andy Silvestri: Yeah. So we’re still gonna need to be able to be diligent and, oversee and shepherd this work, as I was mentioning earlier.

[00:25:22] Matt Paige: Yeah. As long as the solutions we’re building are for humans, I think that’s 100% true. I, wonder if some point though you do have these AI type agents and you’re building experiences and solutions for them, what does that look like?

[00:25:37] Matt Paige: And maybe they’re just completely headless. It’s just the a p i layer in making the everything easy and accessible. That’ll be a interesting evolution if, things change in that way.

[00:25:48] Andy Silvestri: Yeah with the speed we’re going again, I was going back to what we were talking about earlier with how quickly it’s evolving how, much things are adapting to people prompting better, doing better things.

[00:26:02] Andy Silvestri: Like how are we going to what is it gonna be in three months, six months, another year from now? We’re, talking, we’re looking back over the course of only a handful of months right now. And so much stuff has come to the market. So many ideas are out there. The, opportunity to really embrace this area and lean into it as practitioners is really, fascinating.

[00:26:23] Andy Silvestri: And so again may the best, tool win, right? That’s the way I see it, is if it’s gonna be improving our workflows as designers, if it’s going to be increasing value to end users, if it’s going to be making really any aspect of the design process. Just a little bit easier, even if it’s that little bit of an efficiency gain, I think it’s worth it and it’s something that we that we can continue to work through and, learn from.

[00:26:48] Andy Silvestri: So yeah, really exciting times really and, a lot more to, to look at. We have a list as Matt, you mentioned. We have a list of tools that we’re looking through that’s just it seems like it gets longer and longer by the day. So

[00:27:00] Matt Paige: yeah, we got a notion board of about a hundred tools I feel like that we’re going in and testing.

[00:27:05] Matt Paige: And, one thing we’re doing too, off topic, but. We’re creating, what are our guidelines to using these tools which is important for organizations to think through. If we’re just testing a tool internally for an internal project or solution we’re building, great. That’s one level.

[00:27:22] Matt Paige: If we’re doing something on a client project that is potentially exposing client data or something like that’s another level of consideration. So that’s one thing we’re defining at. Patchworks and I encourage every other organization to do the same. And it’s about creating a standard set of practices and just agreed upon rules of how you engage with these tools.

[00:27:49] Andy Silvestri: Right,

[00:27:49] Andy Silvestri: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think it’s super important getting, back to that kind of curation beyond just the quality of what you’re getting back from these tools. It’s about. Is it ethical? Is it accurate? Is is it not infringing on copyrights? All of that kind of stuff.

[00:28:05] Andy Silvestri: And then, yeah is it not exposing you to risk? There’s a very real factor there that I think a lot of there’s just all this gray area that everybody’s gonna have to take their own path through and decide what’s right for, their organization. But I think, yeah a lot of those kinds of considerations, the more you can define them, talk through them, make sure you have a plan, or at least an approach.

[00:28:27] Andy Silvestri: Formulated the better off you’ll be because we’re not gonna see the end of new tools coming out. And, yeah, new, weird, deep fakes and stuff like that. And people, again, being bad actors and leveraging the tools in, not so nice ways. So

[00:28:40] Matt Paige: yeah. Another offshoot too, like we’re playing around with Firefly, Adobe’s version of like Mid Journey and you can actually now prompt in there the type of camera lens you’re using and things like that.

[00:28:52] Matt Paige: It’s just taking it to a whole nother. Level for, better or for worse. But to your point earlier, it’s what jobs are gonna exist? That, that don’t even exist today. Like you think back before pre-internet, you know this, all kinds of jobs that exist now that never existed previously are, do you think we’re gonna have that kind of stepwise change from generative ai?

[00:29:14] Matt Paige: Is it that level of impact or do you think it’s somewhere less, somewhere more? Where do you think. Play fortune

[00:29:21] Andy Silvestri: talenting for us. Yeah. I think within a year or two you’re gonna see prompt engineering on everybody’s resume, right? I think that’s the next step is maybe not that, it’s wholly different job titles or, roles, but it’s more skillset building, right?

[00:29:38] Andy Silvestri: So I think in the near term, Years, the more and more that becomes mainstream in terms of understanding how to interact with these tools. As we were talking through the more valuable that’s gonna be as an individual. If I have that skill and I’ve invested in that, and also to an organization who’s leaning into these tools.

[00:29:56] Andy Silvestri: Like understanding how to talk to the robots is gonna be a really big deal. So, yeah, that’s all I can say. Right now though, yeah, we might see in five years from now that there is a a prompt designer, I don’t know, like something like that, or an AI designer, something, somebody who’s got their little their, sidekick.

[00:30:13] Andy Silvestri: That’s the ai, I don’t know.

[00:30:15] Matt Paige: And I guarantee you’ll see required skills, 10 years of experience with the tool that’s been out there one year. So that’s, guaranteed to be out there. All right, so the five, just to recap the, number one shift from imperative point and click to a declarative chat focus design.

[00:30:31] Matt Paige: It’s changing how we think about user experience ability to get to proof of concept quicker. Again, speed to value, speed to testing. Agile taking to the next level. Number three, exercising caution when leveraging generat generative AI tools and solutions. Number four, impact to creation and utilization of design systems.

[00:30:52] Matt Paige: Get the mundane stuff outta there. And then number five, don’t crash the plane. Be considerate of users actively engaging with the solution. And at one point, see, like you see this with Tesla, they require you to, I think, touch the steering wheel ever so often. Yep. But it’s just to remind you that you are engaged with the, thing.

[00:31:10] Matt Paige: But really, enjoy the conversation today, Andy. And for those that are looking to go a little bit deeper on generative ai, we got the blog out there on generative ai. We’re doing one specific to software development. We’ll have another one coming out. Specific to UX and Design, and we’ll link to some of those in the show notes.

[00:31:27] Matt Paige: And then we also have episode, I believe it’s episode eight, it was our built right live podcast we did with Jason Slacker. Go check that one out. This guy is insanely smart. Leads AI empowerment group right now used to be leading AI products at Ance Health. Tons of experience with a lot of crazy stuff.

[00:31:49] Matt Paige: And there we get into the, idea of how do you validate and identify winning generative AI use cases for your business. So don’t miss that. But thanks for joining us today, Andy.

[00:32:02] Andy Silvestri: My pleasure, Matt. Thanks as always. And yeah let’s, talk more about a, because I think in another six months we’re gonna have a whole nother little layer of topics to talk about, so it’ll

[00:32:11] Matt Paige: keep evolving.

[00:32:12] Matt Paige: We’ll, look back at this and we can test our, hypotheses we’ve had. Right on. All right. Thanks Andy. Thank you.

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