AI is here to stay with us forever; there is no question about it. One of the primary benefits of this new technology is that it can produce results in minutes with a simple request. What took months to develop years ago can now be done in seconds or minutes. A new era has arrived, and our conception of technology has shifted to more sophisticated, fast, and “smart” business models.

Artificial intelligence has also made its way into product design, enabling designers to create user interfaces within minutes. With this new creation experience, many designers (myself included) have questioned whether such new tools will soon replace the design job or if there are just features we need to master to make us more effective and attractive in the rapidly evolving technology market.

AI is not new to the technology industry. Still, since the emergence of OpenAI, many companies have recognized the new potential value they can create for users by bridging the time gap between tasks and their results. Process automation, data reinterpretation, and new support communication channels are the new perks companies find highly valuable to customers.

“We’re AI first” or “AI-powered” seem to be the new quality labels in the industry, which, at some point, makes total sense since we operate in a competitive environment and need to be at the cutting edge of technology and global conversations. On the other hand, this hype can also be seen for some as a trendy marketing strategy that companies use to enter the conversation without properly managing the technology, eventually unveiling product flaws and deceiving users (as seen in the Builder.io case).

Now, adopting and creating AI agents for multitasking can mean the difference between paying multiple people to do the same task or saving money that can be invested in future developments or value propositions.

“We need to fix it with technology, not people” is also a new business mantra that reveals that companies have started to relocate the product value into AI support instead of people, which, to this day, has initiated layoffs, reinterpretation of departments, and creation of new job profiles, generating new companies dynamics with a smaller amount of human talent.

As I mentioned earlier, several AI companies have revolutionized the tech industry and our lives as we know them. Product design is not a stranger to this impact, and rising companies and features like Lovable, Google Stitch, and Figma’s sites, among others, have changed the design mindset by accelerating the materialization of live interfaces from straightforward inputs and almost eliminating the transition between pixels and images to code sources.

What’s the AI promise to designers?

As a designer, I can say that it was always challenging to materialize ideas through another area, specifically the engineering teams. This friction is not always present, but we must acknowledge that this relationship is not always the most effective for multiple reasons, including unfeasible roadmaps, project mismanagement, and incomplete estimations on both sides. So, what happens if you have a new tool that eliminates “the middle man, or rather, the middle process”?.

From design to production, the new promised land now drives designers to embark on a new product-building experience, redefining all existing ways of work. Instant benchmarks, data comparisons, functional references, code validation, and much more are now the stronger stepping-stone of product design.

Is this promise-almost-reality a good thing for designers? Indeed, yes, because, as I mentioned, it allows us to close the coding gap and optimize research time, enabling us to create ideas or test product hypotheses as quickly as possible without needing a single line of code.

But how might all these benefits be a threat to product design?

The never-ending problem with product designers.

Designers had (still, I think) a die-hard habit, at least in my experience, of not considering the product and users’ challenges as a whole element. Instead, they tend to reduce everything to a single outcome: the user interface, overseeing all the multiple elements that can affect a product and user experience.

Learning to understand problems from a broader perspective is a latent issue among young or mid-level designers that in my opinion, this flaw is partly fueled by the “fast delivery” dynamic, which stems from startups that have misunderstood the concept of agility and excuse the incomplete production of flawed products simply because they need to reach the market by any possible mean. I’m not saying we need to stop the production wheel, but having solid design foundations will ensure an optimal user experience from the beginning. This missing skill is systems thinking.

What is this skill?
Systems thinking is “a holistic approach to understanding complex problems by examining how their parts are interconnected within a larger system. It emphasizes understanding the relationships and interactions between components rather than focusing on individual parts in isolation.” Does this definition make sense in product design? I bet you think it does. However, for some reason, designers often avoid considering a solution from a top-down perspective and instead prefer to focus on a single element for development, thereby missing the broader picture of the problem.

Why is this skill relevant in product design?
Imagine being tasked with redesigning an entire product, creating a new design from scratch, or introducing new features to boost sales. There are two ways to solve these challenges: You can immediately jump into solutions and wait to see how products and users respond, hoping not to rebuild the initial solution or over-engineer all over again (the so-called agility approach) or take the second option: build a solution where you perfectly understand (or at leats a notion) how this new solution will potentially impact a broader system, so in this way, once you launch the product or improvement, you have already considered most possible scenarios and behaviors to anticipate errors, friction, or edge cases. In the short-medium term, which option will allow you to create a better product?

When you develop the ability to see problems from above and with all the possible parts in one place, your decision-making will be more effective than focusing only on a single part of the problem. Additionally, increase ownership in strategic decisions as you gain a broader perspective and take advantage of opportunities that others may overlook, spotting potential improvements.

The immediacy of having “high-quality” interfaces with a “simple prompt” is music to our ears; just imagine the world of possibilities this opens up. Time is crucial for companies; there is no question about it, but time can also be a double-edged sword in design. Fast doesn’t always mean quality, and when the promise of quick production becomes the ONLY standard for your design and product quality, complex design thinking becomes obsolete.

For more context:
The hidden cost of AI convenience: Our ability to think — Hoang Nguyen
Has AI Destroyed Writing? — The writer’s path

As with all new trends and technological advances, we’re 100% focused on learning and exploring everything related to AI, and we’re dazzled by all the benefits we can derive from it. As a result of this technological “enchantment,” I’ve seen many benefits, such as those explained above, and some less positive ones, including the increasing lack of business insights, deep process analysis, and complex product consideration like systems thinking.

Companies and the global tech community are celebrating today how a digital product and a startup can be developed in just a few days with a team of no more than four people. To me, that’s just a piece of a more complex equation that must be seen with a critical and deeper look.

In product design, I’ve observed a pattern that suggests AI has influenced our understanding of users and product challenges. All design conversations are either focused on a tool, how to prompt, or how to create agents, and this is not bad at all, but no one seems to stop for a minute and ask first for all the information around that thing that needs to be designed.

With all this tech revolution, I believe it’s crucial to develop critical thinking about how this technology can benefit us before falling into a rapid, global blindness, which will undoubtedly have consequences for us in the long term.

Products and services developed at record speeds are now the new breed of technology. Still, some of them lack a deep ecosystem connection, a clear purpose, or complex scalability (system thinking). For this reason, to me, if AI is not well guided, it results in a mere fantasy of speed.

So, if AI is speed, how can we effectively utilize it without missing the important things? The answer is a simple workflow we have figured out so far in my design team.

Understanding/Accelerating/Building