What is AI Product Design? How Designers Utilize AI In The Design Process

Learn how AI transforms product design by enabling designers to create faster, smarter, and more personalized products.

Imagine you're a product designer working on a tight deadline. The pressure to deliver the best possible results is weighing on you. You've researched the latest design trends, gathered user feedback, and even sketched a few ideas in your notebook to help brainstorm for a new product. But the weight of it all is still heavy on your shoulders. How do you ensure your creative designs meet your users' needs? The answer is artificial intelligence. AI can help you easily navigate the product design process, taking care of time-consuming tasks and even providing creative suggestions to help inspire your next product design. In this blog, we’ll explore AI product design to help you understand how designers use AI in the design process and how it can also help you.

NUMI’s product design solution can help you learn about AI product design and how it can help streamline the product design process. With NUMI, artificial intelligence can analyze your existing designs and provide valuable insights to help you optimize them for your target audience.

What is AI Product Design?

When discussing AI product design, we’re talking about using artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool to simplify or streamline the product design process. You might be curious about how this will impact you as a product designer.

Thanks to AI developments, designers can automate tedious or laborious processes. Product designers may use AI to make their workflow more efficient or assist with decision-making.

AI Product Design Is Not Here to Replace You

The integration of AI-powered tools into a human creative process like design might be a frightening prospect, but these product design AI algorithms are not replacing human designers. Rather, designers can consider integrating AI to help them make data-driven decisions, preceding choices based on instinct or opinions.

AI Can Help You Optimize Your Decisions

By analyzing vast amounts of data, such as human feedback on past designs, an AI product design tool can quickly assess customers’ design preferences and present a design team with options that reflect those customer preferences. The human team will still decide what design to pursue, but they’ll be equipped with data when they choose.

A Look at Current AI Product Design Trends

Writing on the state of AI in 2023, McKinsey found that one-third of survey respondents work at an organization that regularly uses generative AI in at least one business function. The most commonly reported uses of generative AI are in marketing and sales, product and service development (which includes product design), and service operations.

How Can AI Be Used In Product Design?

Research: Data Collection and Interpretation

Artificial intelligence algorithms can help researchers gather and analyze data from many user sources more efficiently. These sources include:

User Feedback
Surveys
Social media
Website analytics

The benefits of AI in research extend beyond faster data collection. AI can identify patterns, insights, and trends in the data, allowing researchers to make more informed decisions about product design and user experience.

Training AI and machine learning for pattern recognition could save days or weeks gathering, analyzing, and interpreting user data. For instance, user-facing applications like Google Analytics provide reports with detailed insights rather than just numbers. Artificial intelligence is also helpful in constructing questionnaires for users and gathering data from them. Specific software, like OCR (Optical Character Recognition), can analyze the data. AI can learn how to interact with users to perform qualitative data analysis.

Visual Design: Automating Repetitive Graphic Tasks

AI-powered tools streamline repetitive tasks in visual design. Automating these tasks frees designers’ time to focus on more innovative and strategic aspects of their projects, ultimately leading to faster completion. Tasks like resizing or color-correcting images, which are labor-intensive but do not require extensive mental effort, can be automated, saving designers time and effort.

AI can also automatically generate designs, layouts, and prototypes, reducing the time and resources needed to create high-quality designs. This accelerates the design process and minimizes the risk of errors. For instance, Adobe's stitch feature automates image stitching, providing a time-saving solution.

Solution Ideation: Personalization and Customization

AI tools can quickly analyze client data, providing UX teams with a deeper understanding of customer needs and enabling them to personalize products according to user preferences. AI offers advanced customization options by accessing vast customer data from various channels.

This capability allows for highly personalized customer experiences where design systems anticipate user workflows and adjust accordingly. With AI-powered personalization engines, some tools can recommend the best experience for each user based on their behavior and preferences.

Design Process Pipeline: Automation

AI can automate the design process, allowing designers to focus solely on the aesthetics of a product without worrying about technical limitations already accounted for by the model performing the design task. Automating the design process can be particularly useful for companies with large teams of designers, complex design processes, or requiring a significant amount of custom-designed objects. These industries include:

Gaming
Construction
Architecture
Advertising
Creative

Certain AI tools are designed to train models to learn design rules based on curated datasets. These rules can then be applied to new, unseen datasets. The model can subsequently generate new designs and be deployed via an API.

Elevate Your Startup's Design with NUMI

NUMI is a framer web design agency that produces world-class framer developers and product designers. Backed by Y Combinator, NUMI handles all of your startup's sourcing/vetting/hiring needs for design. Our fabulous design team ensures all your design work is done well.

‍NUMI helps with:

Product design
Web design
Framer development
Webflow development
Mobile design
Prototyping
UX design
All of your startup's design needs

Subscribe to a guild of world-class designers ready to embed on your team today. Schedule a call with us today to learn more!

Benefits of AI Product Design

Unleashing Creativity: The Impact of AI on Product Design

AI tools generate unique design ideas by analyzing massive datasets, such as:

Trends
Customer preferences
Market demands

It is giving designers a creative edge. For example, AI can suggest design modifications or new concepts that might have yet to be conceived through traditional methods. By enabling rapid prototyping and iterative design changes, AI encourages the exploration of unconventional ideas while reducing the time and effort required for brainstorming.

Data-Driven Decision-Making in Product Design

Product designers can now access insights from analyzing user behavior, preferences, and demographic data. AI algorithms use this information to predict what customers will value most, leading to more targeted and successful products.

Designers can optimize functionality and aesthetics by knowing what resonates with specific user segments, resulting in products that are not only visually appealing but also practical and well-aligned with user needs.

AI Accelerates Prototyping and Testing

With AI, designers can simulate real-world conditions and potential user interactions without needing physical prototypes for every iteration. For example, AI can:

Run performance analyses
Usability
Stress tests

It made pinpointing and resolving potential flaws easy on virtual models. This reduced the need for costly physical prototypes and shortened the development cycle, bringing products to market faster.

Personalized Designs

AI can tailor product designs to individual users, which is especially valuable for products with customizable elements. Through machine learning, AI uses user data to create customized recommendations that appeal to different tastes and preferences. This particularly benefits the fashion, furniture, and technology industries, where personalization adds significant value.

Cost Efficiency

By automating various stages of the design process, AI reduces manual workloads and allows designers to focus on high-value creative tasks. Automated processes minimize human error, saving time and resources on revisions. Predictive models can identify cost-effective materials and production methods, allowing companies to allocate their budgets more effectively and reduce production costs.

Improved User Experience

AI allows designers to gain insights into how users interact with products in real time. This feedback allows them to refine designs to make them more intuitive and user-friendly.

Predictive modeling also helps designers foresee potential issues users might encounter, allowing them to address these proactively in the design phase. As a result, products are more likely to be user-centered and accessible from the start.

Sustainable and Eco-Friendly Design Choices

AI can help designers make more sustainable choices by analyzing the environmental impact of different materials and production processes. It can also identify alternative, eco-friendly materials that meet functional and aesthetic requirements. This capability aligns with the growing demand for sustainable products and helps companies reduce their environmental footprint.

Streamlined Collaboration

AI-powered design platforms can facilitate collaboration by providing a centralized space where teams can access and modify designs in real-time. Collaborative AI tools can suggest edits, track changes, and even predict how design changes impact other product parts, making teamwork more efficient and cohesive.

6 Best Tools For AI Product Design

1. Framer AI: Create Websites with AI in Seconds

Framer AI allows you to generate and publish your site with AI in seconds. All you need to do is explain what you want to build and let AI create the website.

You will be able to quickly shuffle visual elements like color selection and font pairing and use the power of AI to generate copy for the generated web layout. With Framer AI, your role will be more like that of a human curator than an actual designer.

2. Uizard Autodesigner: Generating Multi-Screen Designs with Text Prompts

Similar to Framer AI, Uizard Autodesigner allows you to generate editable, multi-screen designs from simple text prompts. This tool is excellent for creating mobile apps and web designs. Uizard allows you to choose the visual style for your app, such as creating a product in a light or dark theme or a formal or informal style.

3. Adobe Firefly: Graphic Design for the Generative AI Age

Adobe Firefly is a generative AI-powered content creation from Adobe. The tool is available as a

part of the Creative Cloud suite in Photoshop and Illustrator. Photoshop users can use a simple text prompt to generate imagery (in different variations), add, extend, or remove content from any image, and get it pixel-perfect.

4. Midjourney: Text-to-Image Generation for Realistic Graphics

Midjourney is an AI text-to-image generator. The tools are great for creating images, from app icons to product illustrations. The latest version of the Midjourney can create very realistic images of humans and animals.

5. Stable Diffusion: A Highly Customizable Text-to-Image Generator

Stable Diffusion is another popular text-to-image generator. Compared to Midjourney, Stable Diffusion offers more control over the image generation process. Users can customize parameters like the AI model, number of steps, and prompt strengths.

The tool is available as a source code or as a web service. Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are actively evolving, and the latest AI models (Stable Diffusion SDXL 1.0 & Midjourney 5.2) can create highly realistic images. It’s recommended to choose both to decide which one works best for you.

6. Claude 2: An Advanced AI Chatbot

Claude 2 is an AI chatbot and a competitor of ChatGPT. The tools have almost the same functionality, but Claude 2 has a few advantages over ChatGPT. Claude 2 has access to the internet and can provide more relevant information.

The tool can analyze plain texts and files. You can attach files and ask Claude to summarize them. The primary downside of this tool is that it is currently available for the US and UK markets.

How Designers Are Using AI In Product Design

AI-Driven Prototyping with Airbnb

Airbnb integrates AI into its design process to enhance prototyping. By leveraging AI-driven prototyping tools, Airbnb analyzes vast datasets of user behavior to anticipate design preferences.

‍Airbnb described its process like this:

We developed a working theory that if machine learning algorithms can classify a complex set of thousands of handwritten symbols, such as handwritten Chinese characters, with a high degree of accuracy, then we should be able to classify the 150 components within our system and teach a machine to recognize them.

The key takeaway here is the fusion of human creativity with machine intelligence, creating a synergy that amplifies the impact of design decisions. Airbnb’s use of AI in prototyping showcases the efficiency gains and underscores the importance of data-driven insights in crafting products that resonate with users. For product designers seeking to optimize their prototyping process, Airbnb’s approach emphasizes the fusion of human creativity with machine intelligence, showcasing the potential impact of AI in refining and enhancing user-centric designs. To stay relevant in our careers, we must consider how AI and machine learning can also help us do our jobs.

Predictive Analytics with Spotify DJ

In the world of digital products, Spotify has emerged as a pioneer in using AI for product design through predictive analytics: they recently released DJ. Spotify can predict future trends and user expectations by employing sophisticated algorithms to analyze user data, including listening habits, preferences, and feedback.

How is this different from their Discover Weekly? Spotify rolls in its predictive analytics of what the user might like with generative AI information about the song, its artist, and so on. The DJ switches up music genres every few songs and explains why. Based on the video comments, the DJ is well-received, and people want Spotify to develop it further. Personalization is essential in product design, so we designers had better consider how to cater products to our audiences with AI.

AR in Furniture Design with IKEA Place

IKEA has been using AI for years. Through the IKEA Place app, customers can visualize how furniture items will look in their homes before purchasing. AI algorithms enable the app to scale accurately and position furniture within the user’s space, providing a realistic and immersive preview.

This innovative use of AI reduces the likelihood of returns, which are a pain with furniture purchases. Customers can make more informed decisions, confident that the chosen furniture pieces seamlessly integrate into their living spaces. IKEA’s implementation of AI in augmented reality sets a precedent for other industries looking to enhance the customer experience through immersive technologies. Target has since followed suit. For those in the retail or product industries, IKEA’s use of AI in augmented reality showcases how technology can be harnessed to prevent financial loss and attract customers.

Subscribe To A Guild of World Class Framer Developers with Our Framer Web Design Agency Today

NUMI helps with:

Product design
Web design
Framer development
Webflow development
Mobile design
Prototyping
UX design
All of your startup's design needs

Subscribe to a guild of world-class designers ready to embed on your team today. Schedule a call with us today to learn more!

What is AI Product Design? How Designers Utilize AI In The Design Process