Balancing Speed & Quality: Design Skills Still Required

The Great Token Grab

Multiple companies are clawing to get into the AI product design space to unseat Figma as the dominant UI design tool. On a weekly basis, the horde of influencers claim what a game changer the new app is. They overuse the crown icon to imply it is the new king of all design tools. As a product designer, you are caught in an endless loop of feeling behind the ball with your tool skills because everyone else seems to be CRUSHING IT BRO!! You are then drawn into testing the app out with either a free plan or low-tier paid subscription. You try to design and then realize you will need 10x the tokens your subscription offers in order to create something valuable. Is that what they meant by “Be a 10x Product Designer”? It can become a lot more fixing than designing and depending on how you use the tool, it can be less efficient and more expensive than using a traditional design tool (pen, paper, whiteboards, Figma).

It’s Not About the Tool

AI hype has created a sense that anyone can design or create an app. On the surface, this is true. Anyone can write a prompt and create something that technically works. However, when you assess whether the product truly meets customer needs at specific touchpoints AND is competitive in the marketplace, the cracks start to become visible. To quote Syndrome from the movie The Incredibles, “When everyone’s super, no one will be”. 

As designers, our power lies in our ability to assess nuances in business and user needs and create solutions that exceed expectations. Not everyone can do that. Taste and judgment are crucial. AI can tee up some options, but someone with design skills needs to assess the relevance of those options to determine how to use them. Those who write prompts, copy the output, and deliver with no edits are just creating noise. The skilled brain needs to be at the start and end of every AI tool interaction.

Speed & Quality Reality Check

Just because you can build something faster doesn’t mean it should be built at all. AI design tools are good at generating generic or mediocre really, really, really fast. That is never the goal. Getting us to a quality deliverable faster is the goal. Judgement on what the tools can ACTUALLY DO to achieve this goal is key to success.

When speed overrules quality, such as a quick proof of concept, AI prototyping tools are great. Speeding up specific iterations for collective understanding or user testing helps us move quicker to a final deliverable.

Process Does Not Change, Tools Will

To design something specific and valuable, you still have to do the homework. Research, problem definition, technical planning, design exploration, user testing, design system definition, interaction refinements, etc. Skipping any of these steps will guarantee you are just adding to the noise. We use specific tools at each step to help speed us to a quality deliverable. From research synthesis and problem definitions through design exploration and code delivery, the AI tools that get us to quality quicker and cheaper are the ones we will add to our collective toolsets.

Traditional + AI = Speed & Quality

At Fresh Consulting, we already had the ability to design faster than the majority of our clients could provide feedback long before AI tools came into the picture. We now use AI tools to get us to quality quicker in conjunction with traditional design methods. Combining our traditional design methods with AI outputs helps broaden discussions on what works and what doesn’t. We learn faster from these efforts while growing not just tool skills, but design skills for the future.

We are in an age where creating a new product is easier than ever. The question is, do you have someone on your team with design skills or just tool skills? If you are creating a product without a designer involved, you are likely just adding to the noise. To create a competitive product and avoid a pile of technical debt, I highly recommend incorporating a skilled designer or design team. Skilled designers will get you quality faster and cheaper than any “Prompt Engineer”.