I’m a designer, and AI has changed how I work in ways I didn’t expect. Some parts of the job I just don’t do anymore, and I do a lot more of everything else.
Research: the boring part got shorter
I used to lose whole afternoons to digging through references, competitors, and random tabs. Now I get to a solid starting point in a fraction of the time, and I can spend the saved hours on the part that matters: deciding what the research actually means for the design.
- Pulling references and patterns I’d otherwise spend an afternoon hunting for
- Turning messy notes or user feedback into themes
- Poking holes in my own assumptions before I commit to a direction
Exploring directions: five instead of one
Before, an idea had to earn its spot. If a prototype took three days, I’d stick with the first direction that looked decent, because there wasn’t time for more. Now I can explore five in the time it used to take me to do one, and I don’t mean five versions of the same button. I mean genuinely different approaches.
Generated using Midjourney
Killing ideas got cheap
Some directions flop, and that’s fine. Throwing one away costs me an afternoon instead of a week, so I’m way less attached to ideas that aren’t working.
Failing early is so much cheaper than finding out at the last minute.
Prototyping real interactions
This is the biggest shift for me. Testing with users used to happen late, once the design was far along, because building something that felt real was expensive. Now I can get something clickable, sometimes with real logic behind it, in front of someone really fast.
That’s the real advantage. It’s not that I make more stuff, it’s that I get to the next steps already knowing what confuses people and which direction has legs.
| Step | Before | With AI |
|---|---|---|
| First explorations | 2 days | 2 hours |
| Clickable prototype | 1 week | 1 day |
What stays human
AI doesn’t decide for me. It gives me options, but choosing which one makes sense, which one feels right, and which one actually speaks to that brand or that person is still on me. If anything, taste matters more now, because there’s so much on the table and someone has to know what to keep and what to toss.
I’ve also had to learn not to confuse speed with quality. Something coming out fast doesn’t mean it’s good, and sometimes the most useful thing I can do is slow down and ask if I’m solving the right problem.
I have no idea what this looks like in a year. If you’re a designer and still skeptical, try it on something small and real, not a throwaway experiment. And if you do, tell me how it goes.
All images were generated using Midjourney.