The Future of Design in 2025: AI’s Impact on Designers and Teams
This article was enhanced using Grammarly to check grammar mistakes and improve clarity, but the thoughts, ideas, reflections and narrative are original.
2024 has been a year of changes for many designers. AI design tools are evolving, and some worry about the future. Designers are adaptable, we grow and learn as we go, but in a changeable and unpredictable ecosystem, it's easy to feel overwhelmed, insecure, and uncertain about what's coming in the years ahead.
Boosting productivity: AI's role in idea generation and design refinement
I've used ChatGPT for the last 3 years, and more recently, I started using Claude. You can upload an image and get feedback from these tools. You can give the AI a role: Imagine you are a group of Senior Product Designers, "please provide feedback about this design". You could give a targeting audience, a business goal, and a user need you want to solve. You can also provide a judgemental role: "You are a bit of a hater". All of these prompts are possible.
AI tools are advancing beyond reactive assistance to become active collaborators in the design process.
This partner-in-crime role that AI is taking could be highly beneficial for a team of one. For larger design teams, it could be valuable to arrive at design critiques with the basic job done.
The systems go beyond design feedback. Imagine being able to conduct usability testing using AI tools. If you provide a list of usability standards, the tools will flag some common usability issues you may overlook in the design. AI assistants can become fast reviewers of fundamental usability principles, and with that fast reviewer, designers can boost their productivity and speed up the process.
AI as a design assistant, not a replacement
Although ChatGPT and Claude AI are good at design refinement, they struggle with complex design challenges such as user journeys, crafting user flows, and building an information architecture that often requires deeper context and strategic thinking. We usually mention that Heuristic evaluations are not objective enough and that we are all very biased when conducting one. Imagine a workflow where AI could bring more objectivity into the design process (although we know AI is also biased). When we arrive at the design peer review, the designs will be more polished, and the fundamental usability issues will be solved.
Integrating AI tools into the design feedback process
When I started using Claude, I was satisfied. I still use chatGPT more because they don't bother you so much with paying, but Claude has become my place to go for challenging my design approach or brainstorming. Claude seems to have a stronger design background than ChatGPT. As always, the output depends highly on the data you provide and your ability to guide the conversation. In the first iteration, you can get a very vague response. You must be specific to get a good outcome. You often need several iterations of the prompt to produce valuable, high-quality results. But when you have it ready, it’s like having a second you to help. Claude or ChatGPT could be used for heuristic evaluation using the proper prompts. That could change the designer's workflow.
The hybrid role of the designer
In 2025, we might face the question of what kind of designer we want to be (again). This debate is always present, with visual and UX designers competing to define what it truly means to be a designer.
Design tools like Figma and Framer market themselves as the ultimate solutions as if the best goal a designer could have is to master their tools. They present design as a hybrid between a designer and a developer, so the design could evolve into a Front-end.
A hybrid role for designers: Either a tool master or a strategist
If designers adopt this hybrid role, we could become more executors of someone else's vision (more than now). Executing a vision defined by others can be creative and valuable, but we must ask ourselves what value we want to bring to the business and users. Do we want to be tool experts, spending countless hours learning new interfaces that change frequently? What will happen when Figma and Framer no longer exist? (and it will happen). Will your expertise be obsolete, leaving you to learn new tools and programming languages? What will happen when AI is capable of both designing UI and programming?
Let's consider another potential path for designers. This path focuses on strategy, business acumen, and data literacy. In this Product Design role (sound familiar?), designers use AI tools to elevate their skills. The tools in this context are at the service of designers, not the other way.
Democratizing design: How AI could bridge the data gap for designers
Designers are often not in strategic conversations due to a lack of business acumen and data understanding. When businesses ask about our design's impact, we often rely on the product manager for the data. There is a knowledge gap, and AI can help bridge this gap. ChatGPT or Claude AI can help us analyse raw data in minutes. If you know which questions to ask and you can check that the process followed by the AI is correct, it can save us hours of work and give you access to data and insights you didn't have before. Triangulate insights, generate charts, and even create a report in minutes.
In an analysis of 500 rows of data, what I found more interesting was ChatGPT's ability to triangulate the data and how I could ask anything and always get an answer. I then manually checked the results because LLMs can make mistakes, and some hallucinations might happen, but the data analysis features you can get with the Plus plan are pretty decent. As always, the tools are more or less valuable depending on how you use them, so you need data knowledge to perform your analysis, get a good result and check that it is valid.
Have you imagined a design team analysing their design impact without the dependency on data teams or engineers? This shift could be a game-changer in democratising design. It could dramatically switch how companies perceive designers as we could show our work's impact without losing time, dealing with complex tools, or waiting for other teams.
Save time with Dovetail’s tagging and clip features
Sharing research findings is as crucial as conducting the studies themselves. Dovetail has some handy features like tagging and clip creation. Let's say you ran 10 user tests. Next, you need to write your report and share it with the team, but the evidence of someone talking or observing what someone did is much more powerful than a long text written report. Going through 1-hour interview videos to find the evidence you need, creating a video in another tool, and sharing can be tedious and lengthy. With the tagging feature, you can automatically create reels with the best moments without extra effort.
Communicating insights is essential as it provides visual evidence that helps smooth discussions with the team and facilitates collaboration. It allows teams to focus on what's important: the user. Bonus tip: Invite the engineers to the research sessions as observers. Observing users will increase the engineers' awareness of what needs to be changed. They may become good allies to talk with product managers and refine the roadmap with time.
This Dovetail feature is only one example of the AI capabilities many platforms incorporate into their systems. Miro also has an AI feature that allows you to brainstorm and summarise content on the board. Confluence can also help you summarise a page, and Slack has a similar functionality to summarise all the content in a particular thread. Whether we want it or not, AI will be embedded somehow into our workflows. It’s up to us how we want to integrate it. Consider this current picture: Some researchers or designers conduct user interviews or testing, get summaries through AI, review the findings, and share insights with the teams.
Visualising the current research process with AI.
The collaboration shift: How AI improves team dynamics
AI's ability to simplify processes may bring associated risks. One concern is whether AI could incentivise more siloed work. As we become more AI self-sufficient, we may wonder:
Will this create disconnects among team members, as we may no longer look for one another expertise?
If engineers, product managers and designers start iterating more with AI than with each other, how will this impact their collaboration, communication, and overall team dynamics?
A canvas whereas design, devs and product managers collaborate with each other and build on the go, with AI assistance for each area of expertise
The potential canvas offers an image of the future of team collaboration. In this future, engineers, product managers, and designers could work directly with AI assistants on a platform. That could eliminate the need for separate tools. This landscape could lead to the evolution or replacement of collaboration tools such as Miro, Figma, or Figjam. The all-in-one platform solution could bring everything into the same space, where teams could enhance their cooperation using these AI helpers and build on the go.
This shift could work because it relies on simplicity and is conversational. Another point to consider is whether the teams are comfortable maintaining group conversations or prefer using these conversational tools individually. But imagine this future: no complex software like Adobe Illustrator or Autodesk Maya anymore, everything created through prompts, and the AI assistants automatically create what you have in mind.
ChatGPT website analysis: Instant insights for designers
Making quick and informed decisions is usually a challenge. How many hours have we spent trying to find the evidence we seek to make a decision? ChatGPT website analysis capabilities help address this problem. You can copy/paste a website and start asking questions about it.
This feature analysis can help you not only in your job but also in your personal life. I have used it to compare multiple banking websites, which usually takes tedious cross-referencing. With ChatGPT, I provided some criteria I was looking for, and I could find key areas I should pay attention to. The decision is more straightforward with these parameters, and the right path shows itself.
Imagine how this feature could transform competitive benchmarking. You input a competitor's site and ask for a list of strengths and weaknesses based on your specific goals and user profiles.
Try this prompt: Benchmarking of Booking.com and competitors
Creative freedom: How AI helps designers push boundaries
MidJourney has revolutionised AI image generation and substantially changed my design exploration approach. With refined prompt techniques, I can now generate lifelike images and visualise all the ideas and thoughts in my mind. We can’t be good at everything, but with these tools, you can communicate concepts and ideas without the need to be an artist.
I heavily explored Midjourney in 2023, and one of the things that was quite annoying was the problem with hands in bizarre, unnatural postures ruining the image generated. That implies you must create dozens of photos to get the desired result. I didn’t find this very ethical, as the more images you generate, the more you pay. They evolved the tool, and now, you can rework parts of the image and create the work again, making the iterations to get what you want smoother and quicker.
Although I use Midjourneys and find it very fun, I am still debating myself from an ethical point of view. What about hundreds of artists who have made their path to the craft? Photographers, graphic designers, illustrators. It’s fair to have some doubts about this technology. Some people complained in the past about Adobe Photoshop and digital art in general because you could fake photography. Something that was not represented purely. You can get decent photos with Midjourney by texting a straightforward prompt, but you need the knowledge to communicate a concept and have high-quality results. Maybe you are no longer using a camera or a brush but require the same skills.
Generative image tools might change the tools we use and how we use them, but it doesn't eliminate the need for vision, creativity and technical knowledge. The challenge is adopting these image-generated tools while maintaining respect for the craft.
The ethical dilemma: Navigating the balance between AI and authenticity
As a remote worker, I want to trespass the screen to connect with the person on the other side. My colleagues suffering from my background know I am a big fan of Google backgrounds: instead of showing your home, you can choose a background, allowing you to be where you want. More than the feature itself, the background is an ice-breaker, a quick way to answer that question: how are you?
Some platforms even allow you to become different, transforming into a character or improving yourself. For instance, Zoom filters let you apply makeup or make your eyebrows bigger, creating an experience mimicking the addictive approach we see on social media platforms like TikTok.
These features can be playful and entertaining, but we may want to wonder if choosing these alternative versions of ourselves brings us joy in the long term or detracts from our true selves. How much of ourselves are we losing when we constantly choose these avatars over us? Will we always choose ourselves over these artificial representations?
The challenges of AI in creativity and critical thinking
Imagine a near future where your team collaborates in an AI-powered chat and canvas, refining designs and brainstorming ideas with the assistance of AI. These new ways of working could boost productivity, but how might they affect creativity? If we lean too heavily on AI for ideation and analysis, could this hinder our ability to think creatively on our own?
Designers, product managers, engineers… All of us grow on challenges and creative exercises. If we replace brainstorming and analysis with AI, will we still train our creative muscles? Could this impact individual and team talent over time?
Ultimately, embracing these AI tools could speed up processes, but teams must remain aware of how overreliance on AI may affect team dynamics and individual contributions in the long run. Let's work together for a healthy balance, whereas AI supports but never replaces the invaluable humans.
Conclusion: Why 2025 is a turning point for designers
2025 presents itself as a year of transformation. AI design tools are already here, and as the months pass, we can expect new AI features to help us do some of the repetitive manual tasks we used to do. This new setup also brings new opportunities for elevating our skills and assuming more responsibility as part of our role, such as analysing the results of a design and presenting them back with confidence. Although AI tools have advantages, they also raise questions about the designer's role.
Designers may need to decide if they should focus on high-level strategy or become experts in design tools that simultaneously power them to be designers and developers. This shift has been here for a while, with some colleagues often questioning the design value. The key will be finding the balance between using AI for our benefit and keeping the critical thinking that defines us.
