The Blank Page Is Disappearing

Over the past year, I've spent a lot of time experimenting with AI across my UX and product design work — Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Figma Make, Midjourney, and the growing list of AI features showing up in the tools we already use every day.

The question I get asked most often is: "What's the best AI tool for UX/UI design?"

The honest answer is that there isn't one. Each tool has different strengths, subscription costs, credit limits, and security policies your company may or may not allow. What works brilliantly for one task may be completely inaccessible for another.

I've used AI to help plan workshops, write user stories, synthesize research, generate visual concepts, and build interactive prototypes that feel far more realistic than the wireframes many of us relied on just a few years ago.

The biggest shift I've noticed isn't that AI is designing products for us. It's that AI is removing friction from the process. Tasks that once took hours — a discussion guide, a workshop agenda, a first pass at a journey map, a clickable prototype — can now take minutes. Increasingly, designers can move straight from requirements or research into something tangible, skipping the black-and-white boxes wireframes used to fill in. Instead of explaining an idea, we can show it.

At the same time, it's important not to lose sight of the human side of design.

I recently talked with our summer UX/UI design intern — someone in her 20s — who shared a concern I suspect many designers feel. She loves the craft — the experimentation, the handwritten type, the small details that make something feel human. She also worries about a future where AI proxies replace real conversations with users.

Honestly, I think that's a fair perspective. It's okay to be excited about AI and a little resistant to it at the same time.

Good UX/UI design still requires understanding people, asking better questions, navigating ambiguity, and making informed decisions. AI can accelerate the work around those activities — it doesn't replace the thinking behind them.

What's surprised me most is how fast this all changes. Any advice I give today might feel outdated by next week. Because of that, I've stopped thinking about AI as a single tool and started thinking about it as a design skill.

My advice: use the tools. Experiment. Keep what helps. Discard what doesn't. Spend less time producing artifacts and more time solving problems.

The tools will keep changing. Good design judgment won't. And neither will the curiosity, empathy, and human connection that got many of us into design in the first place.