I can only imagine, dear reader, that you have seen as many headlines as I have regarding AI and UX relations. Any of these feel familiar?
- AI is the Death of UX
- AI is the Next Frontier of UX
- AI is Coming for Your Job
- Don’t Get Left Behind: How AI Supercharges UX
The lines are clear: you either fully embrace the AI cult or you’re being dragged, kicking and screaming, from under your comfy UX rock. I get it. It feels like overnight, the battle to protect and defend discovery, research, and craft in UX and Product Design got obliterated by terms like “vibe coding.”
Change, especially at this rate, is rather terrifying. As if we weren’t already scrapping to preserve good practice, here comes a new shiny object that–if some headlines are to be believed–is either your damnation or salvation.
I don’t have a crystal ball. I am not a Seer, and I would be a fool to say not to worry, but I do believe there is a Purgatory between AI as a savior and AI as Satan. And I think that middle ground is found by asking a single existential question: what is the human impact on Product Design?
AI can run circles around us with processing. It can craft personas and assess experiences against those personas while simultaneously generating code from your latest Figma files. It’ll give you a perfect Call-to-Action for your all-too-short-character-count and suggest color substitutions to correct contrast. Hell, now you type in a few prompts and you can have a fully functioning app with a slick UI in a matter of minutes. But there’s one thing AI doesn’t have: humanity.
Too cheesy? Fair enough, but hear me out.
We use AI in our Product Design practice at iSeatz, but it cannot replace my team and their expertise. AI doesn’t care that a screenwriting experience sounds monotonous and is more likely to put a user to sleep than inspire them to travel. AI doesn’t care that the UI options it provided are going to frustrate a visually-impaired user so much that they don’t take their trip. AI doesn’t care that the code it generated lacks basic alt tags and aria-labels. But we do (and you should too!) because we, as humans, have the gift of empathy.
That feeling, when you’ve finally taken the leap of faith to book a trip of a lifetime? AI doesn’t understand that. The frustration at travel going wrong and the fear that it won’t get fixed in time to salvage your vacation? AI is blissfully unaware. The elation of trip snags being sorted out and communicated clearly and compassionately? You guessed it: AI can’t feel that.
AI isn’t human; we are. We alone can feel in the depths of our bones, deep in our souls, what it is to have a lived experience and channel that into our work. Being a Product Design professional is more than pushing pixels and perfunctory process. It’s understanding nuance, making strategic decisions, and above all else, staying empathic.
So my advice is this: Have some empathy for the devil of AI (if that’s how you label it) and some skepticism if you think it's a savior. Make it the devil you know by integrating it into your process, like we did here at iSeatz. Keep it fed on the parts that are rote, tedious, and frankly not worth your expertise. But, as you embrace its benefits, acknowledge and celebrate that it is not the end-all be-all. Know that it can’t replace the human in human experience because it is neither human nor can it experience. By striking that balance, you’ll find yourself saved from the hell of busywork and free to make the big, important impacts that only you, as a real human, can do.
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