I believed (deeply) that AI would NOT disrupt Product Design as a whole, but rather serve as a collaborative tool to enhance a designer workflow.
I guess I was wrong.
Think about how humans interact with digital products: each person has different needs, experiences, and behaviors. The content — for content driven products — usually adjusts to each user, but everything else in a digital product is served the equally to every user. Same User Interface and same experience (with few manually curated exceptions).
Ideally, every digital product would be tailor-made for each user.
The truth is, it isn’t.
There are simply too many variables to account for.
From tiny design preferences (some prefer warmer color palette while others appreciate clean and monochromatic palettes) to deeper interaction behaviors (some feel more comfortable having “single gesture actions” while other want to have more options when interacting with an element). It’s just not possible to take every tiny variable into account.
For these reason we’ve came up with systems that help us cope with these weakness.
Examples include creating User Personas (groups of users with similar interests and behaviors who can be served the same product with similar results), Design Systems (standardization of the appearance and functionality within a digital product) and many others.
We have established roles within our teams for specialists, in order to maintain consistency; created conventions so we can have a Home, a Profile, Notifications and many other sections, to leverage what users have already learned from other digital products.
This is not ideal, but it works.
People can learn to cope with the limitations our current Product Design paradigm has, and make use of our digital products.
I see this paradigm shifting in the near future. New ways of thinking about product design will emerge.
Technology will reach way past improving Design tools (such as Photoshop adding generative image enhancements and interactions, Figma adding A.I. to assist designers in automatically create interfaces or naming layers).
How deep into our way of thinking towards Product Design can it go?
With the ability to deeply understand each individual user, we could create a Dynamic UI on the fly. This UI would serve different modules to each user, accounting for their specific needs, behaviors, and predicting what they might want to do next.
The way we think about user flows — where we map a user’s journey through our digital product — might change drastically. We could start creating Morphing UX, where user flows are contextually created in the moment a user interacts with an element of our product.
This can lead us to think the user flow at an atomic level, mapping the outcomes of each action or module instead of mapping entire sections/pages.
This even changes the way we could think about the information architecture. “Sections” or “Pages” could become obsolete as we could serve the user with what they need, when they need it.
We’ll be able to create these Dynamic UI not to serve “the archetype,” but to serve individuals like Angela — 32 years old, with seven tattoos, married to her high school boyfriend, who likes rock climbing on weekends and when she hangs out with friends, she drinks only one beer because the second one gets too bitter for her palate, but she still wants to be part of the group.
We’ll be able to create Morphing UX not so it adjust to “GenZ users”, but to provide a quick path for Jordan — who works as a producer for a youtube channel in Minneapolis and needs to be fast and productive during her work day but wants to explore in the afternoons.
• • • • •
Today, we lack deep user knowledge, and our customization capabilities are limited. Tomorrow, we’ll need to understand where to draw the line on specificity — at what point does it become overkill?
Will these be better? I think it will.
We’ll need to dial it in and find the new limits.
Can’t wait for the next round.
