AI tools to assist your design and development workflow

The rise of AI has been accompanied by a lot of hype and fear. People are excited that it will completely transform the creative industry, while others are concerned it could replace their job entirely. The reality is that neither of those realities are likely to come about very quickly.

We are at the beginning of a new wave of innovation with AI, and we need to ensure that our AI systems are set up to assist our creative process. This process begins with understanding how to use AI tools at different stages of your own workflow to get better results with less effort.

We want to be able to focus on solving the big problems, rather than stressing over the semantics.

Supporting the design process with AI

The typical design process involves ideating, wireframing, creating high-fidelity mock-ups and then testing with people. There are AI tools which fit into each of these parts of the process.

Ideation

The ideation process can differ based on what project you are working on. If you’re working on the design of a character for a film, the process will be different to understanding the pain points of users of an application.

If your ideation process needs to be more style-based, then you could take advantage of a tool like Dalle-2.

With Dalle-2, you can provide text prompts which the system then internalises and provides some images of what it thinks you mean.

For example, with the prompt “astronaut playing football in the style of the film Tron Legacy”, Dalle-2 created these pieces of art:

The outcome of these prompts are often still quite rough and unpolished, so you will likely not be able to create an entire scene or design based off them, but they provide a good starting place for idea generation and visualising the theme you’re trying to describe.

If you’re working on a UX/UI project, your ideation process should significantly prioritise user feedback and interpretation of their…