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The Two-pronged AI-first UX Approach


UX practitioners need to embrace the almost ubiquitous AI with a two-pronged approach. Unlike other departments in an organization, UX practitioners need to take a highly practical approach to achieve both internal and external design objectives. With changing times, we need to change our practices as well.

  1. AI Assistance: Optimise and accelerate design workflow with AI tools
  2. AI Infusion: AI-first user experience for your product, service, and applications.

AI Assistance


This is a question about how effectively one can leverage AI to optimize, streamline, and accelerate the design workflow, process efficiency, and even enhance overall internal collaboration. Utilizing generative AI at work is almost a no-brainer today, however for design, it's only one piece of the problem. For design teams, it solves the way we do work, not the work itself.

Design teams need to audit and deploy AI in areas where it can work better than your average designer output and turnaround time. While speed is important, quality matters. Unless AI is better than human output, there's no point in employing generative AI to assist us in our design workflows.

The question of how would one gauge who is better is a question for your design leaders and you as a UX practitioner. (Nobody knows your context better than you) What's the point of AI assistance, if it can't do a better job? The best way out is to make AI a design-team member and move fast.

AI Infusion


Simultaneously, UX practitioners need to focus on how to be AI-first in terms of the end design outcomes. This is more of what your users get through AI by using your product, service, or application. UX practitioners needs to be on top of things in their domain to comprehend use cases, ideate, and offer solutions that are AI-first UX solutions.

We spoke about AI assistance earlier — more of an internal affair, and just a means to an end, which is AI infusion. The former is optional; the latter is inevitable. Knowing AI tools is not enough. We need to be AI-first in our very thinking and doing to deliver strategic design solutions that are highly contextual in nature.

As UX practitioners, our strength is understanding the user like no one else in the organization and it's imperative to focus on the user's context when you are infusing AI. Don't randomly talk about AI and add to the noise. Build use cases specific to your business and offer value to product and business teams. 

The fundamental question at work today is, how effectively can a UX practitioner infuse AI into new products as well as retrofit AI into the existing user experience?

As designers we have a greater responsibility in shaping new experiences and creating new reality through our work. Most importantly, let's use AI for good.

Originally published on LinkedIn on March 4, 2025

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