Why UX Design Is Important In The Age Of AI

UX design has been around for a long time. Often understood as a set of processes, techniques, and tools, it’s really all about building confidence. Building confidence you’re about to ship a well designed app and product that will have a positive impact in your customer and business.

Building confidence in your product is why UX design is important. It's why having a sound UX strategy is key to shipping well designed product/ 

Well designed products means happier customers. Happier customers means more business.

I’ll break down why UX design is important and then why it’s important with AI.

UX Design Is Important In Building Confidence

In the product development world we tend to get caught up in processes and tools (agile is such a good example of this).

UX Design is all about building confidence in your product. Confidence your product will work well for your customers.

Why Build Confidence

One day you’re going to ship your product. How are you so sure your users will be happy with it?

If they are not, you’ll find out pretty swiftly.

Either by limited users signing up, churning, not paying, or using your product and complaining. Or worse, yet, the don’t want your product. You built something no one wants.

If this is the case, you do not have a well designed product.

You want to raise the level of confidence you have have a good product before you ship it. Before you invest a ton of time, energy, and resources into a product you want to have a high level of confidence in what you are about to ship.

This is why UX design is important in the product development process: it raises the level of confidence in your product.

Confidence in the Product Development Process

A proper UX strategy will mean an efficient product development process.

• User research helps identify the right problem customers are facing
• Design Ideation means we are exploring the solution space, raising our confidence we’re going to focus our efforts on the right effort
• Prototype and testing helps us iron out any UX issues early in the process before we get to developing features.
• Detailed Visual Design means our software will look good and be as perfect as we can get it.

All these steps helps improve the confidence of what we are building

From early on all the way to shipping, you’re constantly building confidence in your product.

UX design is an important piece of that puzzle.

Confidence in the Business Impact

We can get caught up in crafting a well design product and internally being happy about what we ship.

Nothing wrong with that.

Users Vote With Time and Money

But the best part of it all is seeing positive business results. In a lot of ways, users vote with their time and their dollar. If they are spending time and money on your app that’s way of saying they like it.

And that’s good for business.

Design for your customers and positive business results will follow. It's all linked

 

Why Design Is Important When Using AI

AI is here and it’s changing how we do work. A few benefits of AI on software development:

Speed

It’ll be increasingly faster to get to market. Tools are able to churn out designs, prototypes, and even shippable code. Months turns to weeks, and week turns to days. We’ll see more and more product and features being deployed.

Efficient Spend

With AI you get a lot of bang for your buck. And saving money in software development is a good thing. AI based automation testing is one of the bigger areas where companies will see savings.

But even in the general flow, the idea of being able to get a product out much quicker than without AI means a huge cost savings.

Improved Decision Making

Real time data analysis and the ability to instantly summarize large data sets will help product teams make much more efficient decisions

But The Bar Is Lowered

All of the above sounds good right? But here’s the thing, AI lowers the bar to entry. This means an increase in competition.

More products out there for consumers to choose from. More products for user to “vote” on. They’ll have more options to choose where to spend their time and money.

They’ll also have access to all the other benefits: Speed, Efficient Spend, and Improved Decision Making.

UX design can set you apart.

 

UX Design Will Help You Stand Out Amongst The Competition

So let’s go back to the purpose of UX design: it’s to help you build confidence in your product. With AI, yes you can ship more in less time. But if you ship the wrong things or if those things, that’s a waste.

It’s all about efficiency. And building and shipping the wrong product is inefficient.

UX design is important to shipping the right product. You don’t need all the tools and processes that get touted with UX design.

You need a fundamental understanding of the basics of what it does.

Upfront, UX design can help validate you have the right ideas. Talking to users will help you understand customer pain points in a way that compliments data from AI.

Ideating on ideas will ensure you prototype the right ideas.

Testing with users before you ship builds confidence what you have works well for your users.

And if you are doing that and your competition is not, you'll stand out.

Design and AI

The key here is for UX design practices to leverage AI. We can code faster with AI, we now need to design faster. We can be more thorough and efficient with our code. The same needs to happen with our design.

A couple areas I’m seeing this already happen:

• Skipping cumbersome prototypes for actual working coded prototypes using tools like Lovable or Bolt.
• Using AI to summarize transcripts from user interviews.

The companies that not only ship product faster but ship solid product that users love will win.

UX design fosters this.

UX Design Is Important to Efficiently Shipping Good Product

Being efficient and shipping good product is the name of the game. UX design helps with that and is important.

Now with AI it’s even more important