[ossa-ma]

The more I think about it the more this isn't good for design [EDIT], for a few reasons:

- The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive. An AI model is incapable of that, it's uninspired, it will absolutely converge to the norm and homogeneity (you see it everywhere now, just scroll on ShowHN and take a look at the UIs) and produce the safest design that appeals to its understanding of the ideal user.

- Good designers will reject this, they prefer to be hands-on and draw from multiple sources of inspiration which is what Figma boards and Canva is good for, also mainly for cross-collaboration. If you've seen how quickly a great design engineer can prototype you'll know that "speed" they advertise in this video is not worth the tradeoff.

- Creatives typically have a very very very high aversion to AI.

- Non-designers will not see a purpose for this tool, basic design can already be done through Claude Code and Claude.ai, I fail to see what this could offer unless they leverage a model that is more creative and unique by default (you can not prompt/context/harness engineer creativity believe me I've tried).

- Design is a lot more than just UI. Tools like this ignore so many other important aspects like: motion, typography, images, weight, whitespace, sound, feel.

[gpt5]

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive

Designing a user inteface involves thousands of small decisions. When trading off pros/cons for each of these decisions, in 99% of the cases, the right answer is ‘optimize familiarity.

That’s why Android and iOS look the same, and why the small differences between them are where contention happen.

If you adopt existing patterns, your users would be instantly familiar with your app, and the design will not get in their way.

[ossa-ma]

You're arguing for familiarity in tactful design, while I agree that for most users this is a good thing, repeatability of existing patterns does create that immediate familiarity.

HOWEVER, that familiarity is only a virtue because someone, once, deviated hard enough that their deviation became the new familiar. AI can only optimise toward the current snapshot of "familiar". It cannot produce the next one. If designers outsource all their thinking to a model even in tactful design we would never have groundbreaking design concepts like "pull to refresh" or the command palette.

[rTX5CMRXIfFG]

> someone, once, deviated hard enough that their deviation became the new familiar

That’s not necessarily what happened though. Apple innovated not out of sheer daring but because they also had the best metaphysical paradigm for GUIs that people could also just intuitively grasp. There was a structural correctness to their approach, underlying all the things that we find visually appealing. In the beginning, Google dared and deviated hard from Apple’s design language to establish their own unique identity, but anyone who’s working in the mobile space would Have noticed that Android coalesced into roughly the same patterns over time because of that structural correctness.

[qkeast]

>Designing a user inteface involves thousands of small decisions. When trading off pros/cons for each of these decisions…

Which needs to be done intentionally in context, not homogeneously as a rapid output of a generative tool.

[whatever1616]

When you aim for familiarity you also make the assumption that someone else's judgement and opinion was and is the correct one, when you question the assumed only then can you make meaningful improvements. See the iphone which was totally different to the "standard" phones of its time.

[SwellJoe]

If you want to be creative, you should make art. I love art. I think it's a great idea for people to make art.

If you want to make a GUI, it should be familiar. Extremely familiar. It shouldn't invent new ways to interact most of the time.

It is well-known that "intuitive" in UX almost always means "what I'm used to". If you're regularly "innovating" in UI design, you may be making the product harder to use, maybe much harder to use.

It certainly isn't unheard of for new ways to interact with computers to be better than the old, but they are usually tied to new physical aspects of our tools: Touchscreens needed new ways to interact, and maybe there's still some room for creativity there, but not much. The mouse obviously required innovative ideas for several years. But, also, the odds of your wacky new idea being the right way to change how people interact with computers are pretty low, unless you're working at FAANG and have a UX research team and budget to test it.

You can get creative in how it looks, but you cannot get creative in how it works.

[docmars]

I agree somewhat, there's a common language for building products that most people understand and expect.

Innovation comes from the ways people differentiate, without straying too far from the tried-and-true patterns. It's the tiny decisions that situate UI elements and yes, reinvent the wheel sometimes, that can tip users over to whatever you're building because you did it better, or in a way "most" (the average) never thought of.

If people aren't creative in how it works, then really they're all just making the same, boring products, without truly competing against anyone in a meaningful way in the problem space. Visual appeal isn't a sole differentiator.

[ctoth]

I noticed in your list that you didn't mention accessibility. I would personally rather have an accessible design than one which is "original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive." and here we are.

[ossa-ma]

I should have mentioned accessibility. It supports my argument more than yours. Accessibility like captions, voice, keyboard nav, dark mode are all a deviation from the norm by a minority (something AI is completely incapable of doing) and a fight against familiarity which now serves as a great benefit to the majority.

[ctoth]

This ... This is simply not true. I use a screen reader. I am using it right now. I can confirm that AI-generated code, by default, is far, far more accessible, cares far more about keyboard nav, about DOM order, about using the right semantic HTML, about the things that I care about than your average human-designed slop.

And no, it doesn't just add ARIA to everything as is so typical by poor practitioners.

[ossa-ma]

I think we're arguing two different points. You're arguing about implementation, AI is great at this given the existing defaults and the right prompting. AI was trained on 30+ years of accessibility standards that a minority of great humans fought to establish as a familiar practice.

I'm arguing about invention. It is extremely unlikely that AI will be the one to invent the next accessibility paradigm, because that requires deviating from the training distribution, which it CAN'T DO.

I'm also arguing that this homogeneity in design will lead to an atrophy in inventive, unique and original thinking.

[senordevnyc]

It is extremely unlikely that AI will be the one to invent the next accessibility paradigm, because that requires deviating from the training distribution, which it CAN'T DO.

What is it about our own architecture that lets us innovate beyond our training distribution?

[paul7986]

Web design / digital design is a dying field as businesses will start paying one person who does 3 to 4 roles (PM, UX Research, Design and UI Development - tho why use a design tool for web stuff when AI tools generate designs in code), as well now tons of ppl can do this work using AI tools. Further, is the future of digital experiences user interfaces aka the web or will there be an AI Phone where everything is done / seen on the lock screen (AI generates the visuals as you text or talk to it) and or its more of a text and voice digital experience less UI.

Overall after being laid off in January and a 17 year UX Research/Design/Dev career Im starting school in my early 50s to change careers.

[whatever1616]

>AI Phone where everything is done / seen on the lock screen (AI generates the visuals as you text or talk to it) and or its more of a text and voice digital experience less UI.

I think more expressive UIs are the future but i disagree with this sort of thing being accomplished with a non deterministic tool such as AI generating UIs, you are throwing stability and consistency along with familiarity out the window.

The idea of tools being almost UI-less and composable and modular has been a "dream" since xerox parc or see for example the book "the humane interface" which happens to also ahead of its time outline reasons why such generative interfaces would be a bad idea especially at such a large scale.

AI can potentially relieve some friction with that paradigm but definitely not in that way or even that extent.

[Uncorrelated]

What career are you aiming to switch to?

[itsevrgrn]

i'm also curious what you're switching to

[toomim]

"An AI model is incapable of that."

"Good designers will reject this."

^ Famous last words.

[Sir_Twist]

I could see there being an 80/20-style argument for this sort of tool being used for more generic usecases, with "good designers" using Figma et al. for programs where the UI itself is a selling point.

[ossa-ma]

I will stand by the first point unless models start being trained with different objectives instead of RLHF's three objectives: Helpfulness, Harmlessness and Instruction-following

I will very likely be wrong on the second point.

[monooso]

> Good designers will reject this...

I have no idea how everything will play out, but this sounds a lot like the people saying "good programmers will reject this" six months ago.

Quite apart from anything else, it ignores the fact that—particularly within large organisations—designers (and programmers) frequently have very little say in the matter.

[raincole]

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive.

Jeez I hope fewer designers think like this (and if it's a traditional wisdom among designers, I hope fewer designers in general.) Perhaps web apps will stop moving their icons and buttons around every six months.

[Oras]

Data suggest different outcomes, there was always a way to standardise interfaces, from Twitter bootstrap, all the way to shadcn.

Not everyone is looking for unique design, 70% of the web is still using Wordpress. I would say majority prefer familiarity and appreciate uniqueness.

[ValentineC]

> Not everyone is looking for unique design, 70% of the web is still using Wordpress. I would say majority prefer familiarity and appreciate uniqueness.

Most people using WordPress customise it with many of the thousands of plugins available though, and those plugins create menu items everywhere.

[azan_]

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive.

I guess that kind of thinking got us liquid glass - which everyone hates.

[ValentineC]

> I guess that kind of thinking got us liquid glass - which everyone hates.

Except, ironically enough, enough people involved with both macOS and iOS at Apple didn't hate it enough — until it made it to launch.

Either there's a massive hierarchy issue there, or Apple is starting to suffer from groupthink that negatively affects a lot of their customers' experiences.

[sobellian]

IMO AI will make plain the divergence between "good design" and what people actually want. You're absolutely right that from an artistic perspective, it will produce the heat death of UI. I just struggle to think if teams building will actually care. Boring but polished is completely fine for SaaS.

[dayvid]

This is a great bridge between non-designers with taste and designers who can't fully technically implement their solutions (or want to more rapidly prototype their solutions). Well done AI implementation is like cosmetic surgery. The trashiest implementations you can tell immediately and the more tasteful ones are subtle

[recitedropper]

Plus: So much of excellent user interface design is done through iterating on feedback from live humans testing it with their human sensory system.

Until we have embodied AI's with eyes and hands that provide good enough approximations, the aspect of design bottlenecked on human experience will stay bottlenecked.

[Lihh27]

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive

most of those "breakthroughs" were just constraint hacks. no room for a reload button. no room for another menu.

enterprise buyers don't pay for counterintuitive. they pay so the new hire finds save without training.

[rTX5CMRXIfFG]

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive.

You’re talking about art, not design.

[colonelspace]

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive.

If you want to talk in absolutes, I'd say the best design is the one that results in the desired behaviour of your audience.

[pixel_popping]

why would an AI model not capable of doing something unique? That's literally false.

[spaceman_2020]

Why is everyone hell bent on AI replacing the "best" designers or writers or coders?

Even the most deluded AI bulls don't say that AI is even meant to replace the best that humanity has to offer

[cjf101]

I hate to hand anything to Generative AI tools, but

While Great design breaks the mould, Very Good design is about surfacing the most expected outcomes for any action which reduces friction and lets people get work done. And this generation of Generative tools is very good at identifying the most common/most expected response to a prompt.

[jayd16]

You could have said the same thing about powerpoint vs high quality marketing departments. The "pros don't want this" argument doesn't really hold weight.

This is for non-designers to crank out slop with less effort. They can still be swayed by all the shiny knobs to feel in control.

[vehemenz]

What do you mean by “slop?” This word is thrown around a lot for relatively competent outputs. It’s not 2023 anymore.