Where are we at with AI Design tools?
First Thing Monday, edition #118
Last week I was lucky enough to make it to the AI User Conference in San Francisco. A 3 day conference, with a focus each day on Marketers, Designers and Developers. (I just did the designer day).
It was a great chance to see some demos from various companies that are building the next generation of AI design tools. Thought I'd share some notes of my favourite sessions here.
UIzard (pronounced 'wizard')
I'd heard about UIzard, but never seen it in action. After seeing UIzard CEO Tony Beltramelli demo the product, I was blown away.
It was interesting to hear Tony's vision for the product, where he stressed that UIzard is not meant to replace human design, nor is it made for pixel perfection.
UIzard also isn't positioned to be a Figma replacement. Tony saw it more as a tool for product teams to accelerate ideation and prototyping, and to improve collaboration between design and the rest of the product team. They're actually focussing on tighter intergation with Figma, because they recognize that Product Designers will still to need to finalize the UI in Figma.
Some of the features of Uizard.io that piqued my interest:
The ability to convert hand-drawn sketches or wireframes into editable UI components
Multi-screen mockups, generated from text prompts
Generate a entire theme from a flat design image or screenshot
Wireframe mode - to easily switch between lo and hi-fidelity
Predictive AI used for heat mapping simulations
I'm planning to take UIzard for a spin, and you can too - they offer a decent free plan to try it out.
Voiceflow
This one I have played with a little before. But with so many new products coming out in 2023, I'd almost forgotten that I had.
CEO Braden Ream was there to demo Voiceflow. He described it as a collaborative AI Agent building platform.
Voiceflow is essentially a drag and drop, conversational AI builder that allows you to buld really simple or really complex AI chatbots and agents, that you can host on your own platform.
Here's what really stood out for me:
A super simple, drag-and-drop interface that allows you to visually map out conversations and design the flow of interactions.
Multiplayer mode - Much like Figma, Voiceflow allows collaboration on the tool, allowing teams to work together in real-time.
Upload your data, like your knowledgebase content, and your AI agent can be trained on it.
The ability to define user intents, or actions that a user might want to take.
I've said it before, but I think conversation design will be a huge growth area in our industry, and this could be *the* tool for conversation designers.
Adobe Firefly
I really hadn't dipped my toes into Adobe Firefly, since I no longer use Adobe products. I suspect many Product Designers are the same.
But I was really, really impressed by what I saw in the talk from Ben Vanderberg, Principal Platform Evangelist for Generative AI at Adobe.
What I didn't fully realise about Firefly is fully baked into Adobe suite, meaning you can use generative AI across all Adobe products. It's so much more than "AI generated images for Photoshop", which was my uninformed assumption.
One the thing Ioved about the Firefly demo was the UI. They’ve evolved the generative ai image generation beyond text-to-image. Firelfy offers UI components, like sliders and selectors to visually manipulate the style of your AI images. They even use photographer-friendly concepts (like Apeture / Shutter speed / Field of view) as inputs into your image generation.
And I really love how Adobe have built Firefly into existing Adobe features - like expanding your canvas with the crop tool, or generative AI fill using the brush tool. Super smart.
Adobe were the only company talking about the ethics and challenges of AI generated artworks. I learned about their involvent in the Content Authenticity Initiative, and a "nutrition label" for generative AI content.
Buzzy
This was my first introduction to Buzzy, an AI powered no-code platform that claims to take an idea to a fully working mobile app in just minutes.
Founder and fellow Australian, Adam Ginsburg walked through a demo of the Buzzy workflow. All you need to do is enter a text prompt of your idea for a new app, and from there Buzzy will:
Create a project brief and specification sheet, based on that prompt
Creates the underlying data model for the app
Generates designs for the app, that can then be edited in Figma, via their Buzzy-Figma plugin,
Creates a real life application, with React Native output, a CMS, all hosted in the cloud.
In the 6 minute demo, Buzzy generated an app with
44 screens
35 components
5 data tables
17 data fields
All from a single prompt. Pretty impressive. It felt a little too good to be true to be honest. So I'm interested in hearing from those of you who have used Buzzy before.
As with UIzard, I liked the Figma integration aspect to Buzzy. You can pull the design output from Buzzy directly into Figma, make updates and export back out into the app. And you can also create the app design based on a design system file in Figma.
Key Takeaways
Walking away from this conference, It was easy to feel the "AI will take my job" feels. But I'm more excited than I am afraid.
I mean, there's no doubt - AI can significantly accelerate the time taken to ideate, prototype and even build new things. The sheer ability for AI to instantly generate designs, create life-like conversations, infinite images, and even build simple web or mobile apps. It's incredible.
And while there's a clear message here that designers must stay engaged, and continuously explore these new tools to stay relevant, we're still a crucial piece in the development puzzle. For diving deep into understanding the problem-space, and focussing more on the strategic and creative aspects of building things tha people need and love.
I think the designer's role is safe. at least for now.