How Has AI Been Affecting UX Design?

As in many industries, artificial intelligence (AI) has found its way into user experience (UX) design. 

AI’s use in UX design has been affecting the profession in a number of ways in the past several years. Simply put, AI use can help you improve your UX design process. AI can allow you to: 

• Increase productivity

• Enhance product page quality

• Boost your skill set

AI can’t replace human UX designers altogether, however. It can augment certain UX design skills—such as writing, research, and design—but it’s simply no substitute for your professional judgment. The use of AI in UX design can indeed result in improved user satisfaction and increased market gains, but only with competent oversight. 

Learn more about how AI affects UX design and ways to use it in your work.

Understanding AI in UX design

Before discussing how AI implementation boosts UX design, consider what a UX designer does. A UX designer aims to improve a user’s view of a product or service. Aspects of user experience include customer perceptions and feelings regarding: 

• Product discovery

• Product purchase

• Initial product use

• Product use over time

UX designers utilize their knowledge of human behavior, marketing techniques, and the technology at hand to enhance how users experience the processes of researching, purchasing, and using a product or service. 

Note the difference between UX and user interface (UI): UI refers to how a product hosting website is set up; UX represents how users feel about that product and its website.

How has AI been affecting UX design?

AI has been affecting UX design in a number of ways, helping further personalize user experience by making data gathering a more efficient, sophisticated process. The influence, as well as the sheer capability, of AI in terms of UX design will likely increase in the future. 

Personalized user experiences

AI can likely boost UX design in a variety of ways. AI allows UX designers to collect vast reams of user data, create specific user profiles, and target particular UX techniques to specific users. In this way, UX design becomes highly targeted and personalized. This is possible by using AI to understand user behavior through, for instance, a user’s search history. The technology can thus tailor both the content itself and its website presentation to a user’s apparent preferences. 

New developments in AI language learning, such as natural language processing (NLP), allow more human-like, more precise text generation aimed at specific users’ interests. 

Automation of design processes

AI allows you to automate certain UX design tasks, such as tracking orders and generating shipping slips. This frees you up to perform other parts of UX design. 

Certain AI tools—such as Figma, Uizard, and UX Pilot—can even assist in and automate traditional UX design tasks such as:

• Layout generation

• Color selection

• Component recommendations

AI-driven analytics

AI can enhance a UX designer’s research capabilities by automating data collection and analytics. By gathering more data—and more quickly than ever before—you can, with the help of AI, make better-informed decisions regarding what type of user experience certain people will respond best to. 

Because AI can sort and analyze enormous data sets quickly, it allows UX designers to better understand users’: 

• Behaviors

• Pain points

• Preferences

AI is also capable of predictive analytics, which it uses to predict users’ future behavior based on past searches and purchases. You can take that forecast data and proactively make changes to a product, service, or website tailored to a user’s specific preferences, granting them the most attractive opportunity to make a purchase. 

Improving accessibility

AI powers chatbots and virtual assistants. These can remain available around the clock; users can query them even when human customer service agents aren’t available. This makes getting answers to questions more accessible than ever. 

These AI-driven tools are efficient: They answer questions quickly and accurately, improving customer satisfaction by reducing wait times. Additionally, technology such as AI-based voice navigation allows visually impaired users to search and purchase products online. Adaptive AI can even alter web pages in real time to respond to customer needs, further helping to automate the UX design process with accessibility in mind. 

Challenges of integrating AI in UX design

Challenges exist when it comes to integrating AI into UX design. Learn more about some challenges that you may encounter.

Taking a human-centered approach

AI is capable of generating enormous amounts of text and huge numbers of images in a short period of time, all by user request. What this means is you, the trained UX designer utilizing AI, have a lot of output to sort through. After all, what AI gives you isn’t necessarily worthwhile on its own; it requires a human eye (and mind) to figure out what works and what outright doesn’t when it comes to specific user experiences. 

Mitigating hallucinations

AI will occasionally produce nonsensical or just plain incorrect outputs to even your clearest prompts. Programmers call such outputs hallucinations. Human monitoring is one way around hallucinatory output—trained UX designers need to learn how to recognize hallucinations and remedy them manually. As advanced as AI is in UX design, it’s a type of technology that you can’t trust implicitly to be right all the time. 

Eliminating bias

Due to the fact that programmers train AI interfaces on huge stores of both structured and unstructured internet data, AI may produce biased output to user queries. Bias refers to inaccurate output that enforces socially harmful stereotypes and opinions. Not all AI interfaces are good at breaking away from ethnocentrism: Western-designed AI will likely display a Western bias, which human programmers must carefully remedy. 

Future trends in AI and UX design

With regard to successful UX design, the website, service, or product in question must be:

• Useful

• Usable

• Desirable

• Findable

• Accessible

• Credible

• Valuable

AI can help you better achieve such goals in several ways. To begin with, AI may boost UX design in the world of augmented reality (AR). AR is not the same as virtual reality (VR). In AR, a program superimposes AI-generated content onto a screen. You may be familiar with Pokémon Go!, a popular form of AR. 

Future potentially widespread uses of AR in AI-driven UX design include: 

• Health apps that monitor user behavior, predict potential health issues, and suggest treatments for these issues 

• Travel apps that can book new flights when delays on prior flights come through 

• Home improvement apps that let users superimpose different paint colors on their walls to see what they’d look like before purchasing them 

• Optometry apps that allow users to superimpose different glasses onto their faces, allowing them to “try on” a variety of frames before purchasing them 

• Better, multimodal virtual assistants that can answer questions on any number of devices 

For its part, VR has applications in terms of remote work and allows for safer, simulated training environments for soldiers, police officers, surgeons, and other first responders. As AR and VR become more common, UX designers will utilize AI to create more user-friendly interfaces for such advanced applications.

Learn more about AI and UX design on Coursera

AI has been affecting UX in various exciting ways. UX designers will want to know how to use a variety of AI technologies in order to best adapt to the future of the profession. 

Learn more about UX design on Coursera. Consider the Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design course, where you’ll explore key concepts in UX design. Through Microsoft’s Fundamentals of UI/UX Design course, you can learn about different UX roles, daily tasks, and popular frameworks in the field.