Adapting to AI as a Designer

Jakob Nielsen and an "Urgency around AI"

Jakob Nielsen recently wrote that designers need to have urgency about AI. But what does that really mean for our profession, and how should we respond?

Nielsen wrote a blog post declaring that designers need to have urgency about AI. When I first read this article, I was in the process of being let go from my job, and many of my design friends were at least being threatened with losing their jobs. Nielsen writes that designers need to learn AI but doesn't elaborate on what that would mean in practice. It left me with a vague anxiety and stress, and it's only now that I feel I have the energy to address it.

How Do You Use AI as a Designer?

When you search "Design and AI," you'll find numerous articles describing how AI has helped designers build new apps and improve their workflow.

In this article, they outline how they created both the product design roadmap and the most important features using AI. They used ChatGPT to generate the site map and break down each screen. They even used AI to generate code.

In another article, designers discuss using AI image generators like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion to mockup web design ideas. They also talk about how LLMs can be useful for research—both preparing questions, analyzing data, and querying data afterward. They also used AI for copywriting and to create initial personas for their app.

In a third article, designers use AI for practically everything they need: creating personas, competitive analysis, transcribing user interviews, designing surveys, and generating moodboards.

The common theme across these articles is that AI is primarily used for the first steps of exploration and ideation.

If designers generate a moodboard or an image for a hero section, they still need to use Photoshop to actually finish it. When they create a persona, they need to fill in real data. Currently, AI seems most valuable for speeding up the initial sketching phase and creating quick starting points. The final touches still require a skillful human hand.

What Does It Mean to "Learn AI"?

If this is how AI is being used, what skills do designers need to develop? In this article, the "Grumpy Designer" discusses the skill of prompt engineering, suggesting that designers might be especially suited for it because it requires communication skills that designers supposedly excel at.

I agree that right now, prompt engineering is important. You need to learn how each model behaves and discover the "magic words" that get it to do what you want. But as the field matures, this pain point is something model owners will try to fix quickly.

Prompt engineering will not lead to job security.

A hard truth for designers to accept

Being good at prompt engineering may be valuable in the near term, but I don't see it as a sustainable skill. It's also not very transferable—although you can learn some basic guidelines that apply universally, you'll need to learn specific prompt structures for each model or service.

The article also suggests that building APIs on these models will be valuable. While I see potential in creating new services if you understand an AI model and its API, this isn't typically considered a core design skill. It either veers into a developer role (if you want to write the code that connects to these APIs) or into a more product-focused role. This requires designers to shift their skill set and potentially abandon traditional expertise in typography, color, and composition.

The last piece of advice given is that designers should simply start using all these AI tools. But as we saw in the earlier examples, this knowledge isn't sustainable either. Understanding a model now won't be the same a year from now. If you use one model for a few months and come back later, you'll need to reacquire those skills. This knowledge has a very short expiration date.

So What Is a Designer to Do?

If you listen to some voices, especially on platforms like Twitter/X, it sounds like AI will replace everything—the entire design profession. But if you read about how designers are actually using AI, it's more accurate to say that AI is taking over specific tasks, or even phases of tasks. It's useful to remember that a design job requires many different skills to handle a variety of tasks.

Both the Grumpy Designer article and various Forbes pieces suggest that designers should cultivate interpersonal connection and communication skills. In my experience, as you move from a junior position to a more senior one, you naturally shift from concrete "hard skills" to fuzzier "soft skills" as a manager or design lead. Senior designers typically spend more time in meetings and discussions rather than hands-on design work.

Are we essentially telling all designers to move into leadership roles? A more practical issue is that, in my experience, we're not great at hiring for soft skills. There's no "LeetCode for soft skills" to objectively measure these capabilities.

To Sum Up

Becoming proficient with a specific AI service or mastering prompt engineering won't help with long-term job security. Learning to build applications and becoming a developer might offer more sustained relevance, but then you're abandoning your core competencies as a designer.

The most sustainable approach may be to view AI as another tool in your design toolkit—one that can handle certain tasks more efficiently, allowing you to focus on the aspects of design that still require human creativity, empathy, and judgment.

Rather than fearing AI or rushing to completely reinvent your skill set, consider how AI can augment your existing abilities and free you to focus on the more uniquely human aspects of design.