While there’s been a lot of attention in tech news about how AI is changing the landscape for software development, its role in design is still unclear. Figma recently made a splashy launch of Figma Make with the tagline: "make your ideas real with AI." Turns out it’s a fancy wrapper around Claude Sonnet 4.0 for writing code.
Rather than an AI tool to assist with design, it's another tool to help turn design into code. And once you've started iterating with the code, there's no way to pull that work back into Figma to refine the design.
What we're all learning about AI tools is that there's a big gap between the hype and the current reality of what they deliver.
Every product team now has access to the same AI-powered development tools that can scaffold components, suggest workflows, and generate entire features from prompts. The question isn't whether you can create fast—it's whether you can create right. Speed is commoditized. Strategy isn't.
Look through apps and features created with AI and you'll start to notice something unsettling: everything starts to look remarkably similar. This happens when teams use AI tools to design and build without clear direction. It's the "garbage in, garbage out" principle at scale—feed AI vague prompts, get vague designs that work for everyone/no one. This might be okay if you just want to make incremental improvements to existing solutions, but it's a recipe for disaster if you're trying to build anything novel.
The real competitive advantage comes from what AI can't provide: understanding your specific users, defining the right problems to solve, and bringing human taste and creative judgment to the experience. When everyone can build fast, the teams that invest in discovery, strategy, and thoughtful design are the ones whose products actually stand out.
Read the Blog Post About Design
While Figma's own AI product (Make) is really about producing code, UX Pilot draws things you can edit in Figma. At first blush, what it can do is incredible. Type a couple of sentences and you have a fully-realized, editable design. But when you scratch the surface, it’s not entirely clear what the real use case is.
Based on text input like you might give Claude AI or ChatGPT, UX Pilot returns reasonable-looking screens you can then go on to edit with Figma. But, what is it drawing? While it's nice to have help drawing UI elements, generating sample text, and nesting frames to organize things, the struggle of thinking through what to draw and how to effectively craft a coherent experience is the hard part that UX Pilot can't do for you. And if you’re looking for something to help with just the mechanics, it still falls a little short. There's no doubt that what it does is hard, but there’s no use of auto layouts, variables, or styles, and how it "integrates" with components is incredibly limited. So, all the things you need to create a scalable design system and work with a dev team aren't there yet.
The other problem is that everything it creates looks kind of looks the same. As a design tool, UX Pilot seems like it's still an early experiment. In another six months maybe I’ll change my tune.
Personas as a design tool are the foundation of goal-directed, human-centered design. We use personas because they help us stay focused on our shared understanding of who we're designing and building for—our user's goals, behaviors, motivations, and context of use. To learn a bit more, check out these slides with background on personas, including how and why to use them.
While user research and design are a part of every project we do at Uptech Studio, for companies that want to level up how they integrate User Research within their organization, there's no one better to help with that than Carol Rossi. With over 20 years of experience leading projects and teams, she's an expert at establishing research practices among product development teams.
Whether you need help creating a plan, need advice and coaching, or are looking for comprehensive training and workshops for your team of researchers, designers, PMs, and leaders, you should reach out to Carol directly... or talk to us about how we might all work together.
If you’re curious how we approach design in the current environment of AI hype and the changing world of product development, or how Uptech Studio might be able to help you and your company be successful, I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks,
Adam Korman
Partner, Uptech Studio
www.uptechstudio.com
