This piece is the summary of thoughts by the Chief Designer at Linkup Studio, Nataliya Sambir, about the product design creation process using artificial intelligence tools and methods related to that type of work. She’ll share a blend of her 11-year experience of creating great digital products, including using AI in that process. You’ll also get to know Linkup Studio’s experience in creating products with in-build AI functionality. These insights would benefit startup founders and stakeholders, product managers in SMEs, and others in digital product development. It would help you increase the awareness of the modern tasks and approaches that now enhance the work and of design teams. In the end of the article, you’ll get the piece with Nataliya’s answers related to AI in product design.
Nataliya Sambir brings a wealth of experience in product design, having contributed to over 150 projects globally across various industries. As the Chief Designer at Linkup Studio from its inception, she has played a pivotal role in crafting digital designs for renowned brands including Bosch, Porsche, Impactive, and Reverso. Her leadership has been instrumental in her teams securing the Red Dot Design Award four times, spanning 2022 and 2023. Moreover, a product designed under her guidance was honored as the App of The Day by the App Store, testament to her deep expertise and impact in the field of product design.
Now, let’s delve into the subject matter!
When talking about AI product design, we mainly discuss the two different areas. The first one relates to artificial intelligence instruments or tools that help our designers work more efficiently. I will discuss this topic in more detail in the consequent article part.
The second one means AI product design in the sense of how designers can create products that contain AI in their systems. It’s about the proper creation of the design that would fit user expectations from the product with AI on its board.
In my view, AI tools can't take the place of human designers. Surely, they're useful assistants, but they can only make designs from specific instructions and things already on the internet. They don't have the personal creative touch that a person brings. Designers get what their clients need and want. They solve problems that are more complex and deal with a business background. Linkup Studio's motto states that we bring the "results that matter." It is all about giving meaningful outcomes. Our team uses AI to help designers do the work better and faster.
However, AI is definitely changing the way we approach work every day. It takes care of simple jobs like changing the size of banners and making images. This change means designers have more time to work on tough issues and give better results. They're not stuck doing boring jobs anymore.
In this article, I detailed and specified which tools does our Linkup Studio design team use to deliver great results to our client’s product.
Long story short, we use FigJam, Relume.io, ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, and Dall-E-2 & Midjourney.
Now, I will explain in more detail the tasks we leverage ChatGPT and Dall-E-2 with Midjourney.
At the moment, we are incorporating Midjourney and Dall-E-2 into our daily tasks. To maximize their benefits, we have held a series of learning and knowledge-sharing events to learn the most efficient prompt engineering for providing specific requests to the AI system and extracting the results we need for work.
Recently, we worked on a game project that required graphics that mimicked natural textures like stone, wood, water, clay, etc. Initially, our designer manually created these graphics, which took him approximately 12 hours per design option.
However, when we introduced Midjourney, our designer created two design options for a similar task in just 2 hours. This drastic improvement in efficiency highlights the potential of AI tools to revolutionize the design process.
In UI design, mood boards are critical to align designers and clients on design preferences and style. They also help understand target user preferences.
Before AI, creating mood boards took 2-5 hours of searching through designer resources and stock sites. Now, the tools are so progressive that this task can be completed in just 30 minutes, saving valuable time for higher-level tasks. The use of AI in the design process demonstrably brings practical benefits.
A company's logo is crucial in building brand awareness and establishing a solid brand image. Traditionally, designers would spend significant time brainstorming and imagining ideas for a client's logo.
But with AI, this process has become much more straightforward. By inputting specific requests into the AI system, designers can quickly view potential logo options, gather ideas, download the chosen design, convert it to a vector file, and continue working on it. It streamlines the initial stages of creating branding elements, making the process faster and more efficient.
By inputting the desired style, designers are presented with images that can be used to create post covers, banners for case studies, and other materials. No more routine, mundane tasks.
ChatGPT assists the Linkup Studio team with desk research by providing quick and relevant information that includes:
Our specialists have extensive experience working with various projects, products, and services. So upon getting the info from AI, they know how to separate the essential from the insignificant.
It helps designers create compelling and engaging UX content for products: product descriptions, error messages, and onboarding materials.
Chat GPT ensures better writing style and tone consistency across different sections of a product or multiple products. It also improves language used in UX writing by suggesting alternative phrasing or correcting grammar and spelling errors.
We regularly cooperate with clients from different world parts and continents. ChatGPT assists us in providing information and insights into cultural differences and helping to ensure effective communication.
It includes cultural context (norms, values, and customs in different regions), translating language with taking cultural nuances into account, supervising communication styles, decision-making processes, and business practices.
ChatGPT provides suggestions and examples of code for specific design elements and animations. Furthermore, tools and techniques, such as auto-generated CSS and frontend frameworks, streamline the frontend coding process of Figma mockups.
Designers can now handle 70% of simple design projects in Webflow with the help of ChatGPT, eliminating the need to involve frontend developers all the time. Despite Webflow being helpful in creating simple websites, ChatGPT remains a valuable tool as it saves the team’s time.
After conducting live interviews, our specialists upload transcribed text into Chat GPT. It summarizes the problems using natural language processing techniques such as text compression, keyword extraction, and sentiment analysis. AI identifies important points, filters out redundant information, and presents a condensed version that maintains the original content's essence.
We type in the product we are currently working with, and AI automatically analyzes customer feedback, comments, and reviews. Its built-in NLP allows the conduct of entity recognition and topic modeling to extract key information and understand common complaints and concerns. Based on that information, we can make informed decisions on improving products and addressing customer needs.
Nielsen Norman Group conducted a research where they analyzed 425 interactions of people with generative chatbots, e.g. ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Bard (now Gemini) and shared their summary and detailed guide on their article.
In a nutshell, they summarized the six types of conversations people had with AI. Those are:
To each conversation, people expect the behaviors and results from the generative chatbot.
Surely, AI is not only about the generative chatbot. The idea that our Linkup Studio took from that study was that product customers need to get exactly the result they expect from their interaction with the AI and its value for the business.
Below, I’ll share some of our projects where we contributed to the work with the AI functionality in our projects:
Wholesum is a SaaS platform and mobile app designed for outdoor activities providers, rafting groups, B&Bs, ranches, summer camps, and personal chefs. It streamlines group menu planning, manages dietary restrictions, generates shopping lists, and scales recipes to accommodate varying group sizes.
What value AI added to the products we explained in the video below.
This AI implementation was needed to help Wholesum users streamline their recipe creation process which usually took about 2 hours to generate whatever they needed in seconds.
The design part is that it was important to stay up-to-date with the modern technology and we introduced AI capabilities with a specific and contrast interface to visually emphasize on the feature and increase its usage.
Delfi is an AI-enhanced banking tool that facilitates comprehensive balance sheet analysis. It visualizes detailed financial data, creates market-based forecasts, and suggests improvement strategies, thereby revolutionizing banking operations.
This tool, and specifically the AI functionality has helped supply small to mid-tier US banks with capabilities that were previously only accessible to industry giants.
The design of the AI functionality is built into the product system, enabling easy differentiation of AI functions and predictions in bank graphics visualization. AI provides a relevant set of actions to advise bank managers on the best courses of action to achieve their goals more efficiently. The interface is designed in such a way that it's intuitively understandable how to operate with the AI and what to expect from its capabilities.
Learn more about how Linkup Studio can enhance your AI design and its functionality from our client partner.
Toto is a dynamic platform and social network that is transforming Canadian social activism. It enables users to quickly generate and send AI-assisted letters to government officials, addressing local issues. The platform also allows for sharing these issues and inviting others to join the cause. With its user-friendly interface, tracking features, and focus on practical actions, Toto is particularly appealing and helpful to young, proactive change-makers.
The AI functionality in this platform is designed to simplify people's lives by creating AI-generated letters for government institutions, eliminating the need for tedious manual writing. From a design standpoint, this function is seamlessly integrated into a step-by-step letter creation flow. Users can select their mood related to the issue from a suggested list, briefly describe the problem, and then the AI crafts a letter which is then sent onwards.
SkinSpotter is an innovative AI app for proactive skin health monitoring and early detection of various skin conditions. This user-friendly, HIPAA-compliant app allows swift assessment of 29 skin conditions, symptom tracking, and reminders for medication.
From a design perspective, the entire foundation of the platform is built upon AI functionality and its capability to recognize skin diseases. Consequently, our team has emphasized the user's interaction with the AI, incorporating microinteractions post-photo upload and during the generation of skin disease recognition results.
Crucially, in this and other similar healthcare diagnosis tools, it's vital that the AI-generated results are clearly communicated to the app user. Additionally, there's a warning indicating that definitive consultation and diagnosis should be determined only after consultation with a qualified medical specialist. Andriy Sambir, CEO of Linkup Studio, has elaborated on this in his article for the Forbes Council.
Reverso is a remarkable language system spanning web, mobile, and desktop apps. Its standing as a leading language tool is unquestionable, providing AI-enhanced support in 25 languages. Offering resources like Neural Machine Translation, contextual assistance, and in-depth grammar checks, Reverso consistently solidifies its status as a reliable and impactful linguistic plat-
form.
Reverso recently implemented a module for paraphrasing and grammar checking. The platform's users have two main options in the working window: to "check" or to "rephrase" their entered text. Product analytics revealed that the paraphrasing option was underutilized. Users initially seemed indifferent to this feature, but upon seeing a demonstration of the paraphrase functionality, they showed significant interest.
To enhance user engagement with this feature, our Linkup Studio designers took two key steps:
These strategies led to a notable increase in the usage of the paraphrase feature – a 200% rise – and a 35% growth in premium subscriptions.
There are levels of product design competencies, which I partially based on Robert Dilts's 'Logical Levels.' Artificial intelligence tools are now adept at assisting product designers with basic techniques and hard skills. These include leveraging tools for creating visual or user interface designs as well as streamlining the UX design process.
However, AI cannot replace certain aspects, such as processes, collaboration within the team and with clients, communication, and moving higher up to product and user advocacy. This is a matter of mindset.
Good designers work diligently to change their perspectives, discover more efficient ways to work with products, expand their vision from design to business objectives, and understand customers better. Ultimately, this enhances the value of the product design they deliver. This is the approach we follow at Linkup Studio.
At the beginning of the 20th century's second industrial revolution, inventions and simplified processes led to more efficient production and manufacturing. AI is now enhancing the everyday practices of product designers, similar to how the Industrial Revolution revolutionized the work of laborers over a century ago.
I believe that effective design teams embrace new technologies to optimize research, brainstorming, summarizing processes, and other stages that machines can easily handle. Ultimately, it's the results that matter, right? The focus shifts from mere work-for-the-sake-of-work to delivering tangible outcomes. Therefore, designers adapt and grow stronger.
When considering collaboration with a design team, it's crucial to ensure they are open to embracing technologies. Teams resistant to adopting AI may deliver results more slowly and at a higher cost compared to those leveraging AI.
AI will profoundly impact the entire industry and the ways designers approach their routines.
At Linkup Studio, we plan to educate and upgrade our designers' skills by mid-2025. A key aspect they need to learn is psychology, which is understanding how UX patterns influence product usage and how this affects users' perception of the product.
Additionally, our designers are developing a habit of approaching their task-solving and product-creation processes with AI assistance. This began back in 2022 and continues today, as we're always exploring better ways to prompt engineering and investigating new tools that can enhance the quality and speed of our deliverables. It's important to note that AI will not be able to create a game-changing product by itself. It requires the experienced brain of a professional and a synthesis of human intellect with AI capabilities.
Our designers are also learning how to collaborate more effectively, how to facilitate efficient processes, and how to be more than just hands-on workers. They're becoming trusted partners and maintaining strong, professional communication with Linkup Studio's client teams.
The last point, which is half-joke and half-serious, is this: As a product owner or founder, you might need to meet your team or chief partners from the outsourcing team face-to-face sometimes. This ensures you're collaborating with real people and not just AI-generated videos.
At Linkup Studio, we see that AI tools are shaking up how our team approaches designing products. AI isn't taking over the job of designers, but such tools are making life easier. We've got some great examples of this, like our Wholesome Food Calculator and Reverso projects explained above. Those examples show that AI has helped us work faster, come up with better ideas, and make things easier for users.
The main point here is that good old-fashioned human creativity is still crucial in successful designs. With this change, successful designers need to embrace AI, acquire new skills, and learn how to maximize these tools.
Looking ahead, we're pretty sure that the way we design stuff is going to be a team effort between people being creative and AI doing its thing. This combination is already showing us some exciting ways to innovate and get more efficient.
..svg)
..svg)
..svg)
.svg)
