Figma IA
Figma announced a series of new AI features this week at their annual conference, and they were greeted by designers with both joy and dismay.
Tools like the ones that were announced are appearing across the industry, but, as a Figma, the most popular tool for modern product design, will make them commonplace, and soon we will consider them normal, just like any other advancement in design tools in recent decades.
Some people are panicking, some are excited, and some are indifferent. I'm somewhere in the middle, but I have concerns that are exacerbated by these new tools and capabilities.
To explain these concerns, I will distinguish between two types of AI-based features that Figma announced this week:
- Using AI to eliminate or reduce the time spent building designs and prototypes in Figma.
- Generate UI designs from scratch, based on a text prompt, using models trained on common product interfaces (and, in the future, work created by Figma users, unless they opt out).
I'm excited and have very few concerns about type #1, because the job of product designers isn't to create Figma models, but rather to solve problems and release software.
I am convinced that the new resources allow us to spend less time creating ephemeral artifacts that are merely a stop on the way to the final destination.
These features involve things like automatically connecting prototypes, populating a model with dummy data, translating strings into other languages, automatically naming layers, generating placeholder images, etc. They are all good and useful, and aim to save designers time so they can spend it on things they are uniquely positioned to do.
But what about the #2 type, the feature that Figma labels in its UI as “Make designs”? This allows anyone to enter a prompt and have Figma create a mockup from scratch. In the future, the company plans to train its models on designs created by users.
Some are concerned that this type of feature could take jobs away from product designers, while others see it simply as another way to automate the tedious parts of a designer's job, giving them more time to do what they do best.
I think it's both, but I don't think it's... because AI.
There are many companies, and the number seems to be increasing, that are more than happy to delegate the work of designers to people capable of using tools to produce a simplified version of what a designer is actually capable of doing.
For those who see the primary value of designers as producing interface mockups, the advent of new AI tools in the vein of Figma's "make designs" button will certainly seem like a viable replacement for a designer's work. And this isn't limited to AI—as design tools become more accessible and approachable to everyone (which I consider a positive point overall), the barrier to creating something that, on the surface, looks like a designer's work is lowered.
Canva is an excellent example of how this isn't strictly... because AI is a natural progression, but it can certainly be accelerated by it. The commodification of design as a practice began long before the widespread availability of generative AI.
Product managers, engineers, and others can now produce design artifacts more easily than ever before, and many companies are willing to accept the resulting below-average solutions to cut costs and move forward faster.
Machines won't make our jobs obsolete, but corporations will, and they'll use increasingly intelligent machines as an excuse to do so.
