I’d like to take this opportunity to do a reintroduction into the direction I’d like to take my masters topic after much deliberation. My bachelors topic had a lot to do with how it actually is to do a job as an UX/UI designer, since all the confusion around our profession was overwhelming even at the time.
Recently, something happened at my workplace where I had to take a step back ask myself that question all over again. The lead programmer fed my Figma design file into Claude Design, without asking me or even consulting with me. The design that came out wasn’t even bad! To be frank, I was quite shocked and I asked myself the question: “If AI can generate UI instantly, what even is my job anymore?
The Human Element: AI and the Evolving UX/UI Designer
The relationship between generative AI and product design is moving and changing constantly at a scary pace. Teams are adopting these tools fast in the name of efficiency and results. While these technologies really do make a difference in time spent, they often don’t take corporate design consistency and human experience into account. This thesis would explore how this would change the responsibilities, workflows and attitudes of the human designer within a team.
Research questions
How can AI-generated design outputs be responsibly reviewed and refined within a professional UX/UI workflow?
How can generative AI be integrated into professional UX/UI design workflows while maintaining human-centered design principles?
What does a healthy co-creation workflow look like between a designer, a developer and an AI agent?
How can UX/UI designers maintain a human-centered approach in AI-assisted design workflows?
- How do we navigate the ethics of feeding proprietary design assets into models for quick corporate efficiency?
Design Relevance
This topic is very relevant to the design field, as it’s becoming a core part of most workplaces. In workplaces where UX efforts aren’t supported already, UI designers have essentially switched gears from tinkering in Figma and looking at every pixel for perfection, to kind of auditors or reviewers of AI-generated designs. This change is new and deserves addressing in the academic field, where we were taught that manual work that is now seems to be becoming obsolete (or is it?).
This isn’t just my own personal crisis, it’s an important moment for the entire design field. If we let non-designers or developers blindly push out pure AI outputs just because it’s faster, we’re gonna to end up with an internet full of broken, generic and not human-centered websites and interfaces. I actually really like the internet so I’d like to research and navigate this newfound blunder somehow.
Challenges
I see a lot of challenges with this topic, but the most obvious one to me is navigating questions of ethics. What’s ethical within design and workplaces, does it matter? Those theoretical or philosophical questions pique my interest, but are hard to visualise scientifically. Another challenge is finding a fair perspective myself with developers and business owners. Developers love AI because it helps with tedious manual coding tasks and bosses love it because of the efficiency and features going online faster and faster. I want to make sure that my point is helpful to future designers, because I do believe we’re still needed and not replaceable.
Upcoming Research Steps
My upcoming research steps are as follows:
- guerrilla testing and/or interviews with my peers to gather primary data
- keeping an “AI interaction diary“, where I write down my experiences with AI in the workplace and if they help me save or lose time in different contexts
- researching papers and facts to help me out when writing the thesis in the future by building a bibliography already
- developing the idea of the “governance framework” or something which acts as my work piece in the end
Personal Motivation
My personal motivation was briefly touched upon in the first two paragraphs of this blog and it’s all about my reality as a designer shifting. This topic would also compliment my bachelor’s thesis nicely, given it was all about the hard skills of from-scratch, manual UI design. It was focused on UI design and making a pretty prototype, but totally missed out on the UX part thanks to workplace constrains. This time I want to use my workplace experience and do it properly (with UX methods too) while ensuring that the human empathy doesn’t become “automated away”.
Relevant Institutions
The Interaction Design Foundation: This academic website is something I’ve used before, but now has a big “Get the skills that employers want most: Combine AI skills with timeless design expertise that AI can’t replace.” tagline.
