There’s a lot of noise about AI at the moment, and not much of it is calm. So rather than add another hot-take to the pile, I want to start sharing a little more about what we’re seeing at Unfold in practice.
In what I hope will be a series of posts, I’ll be sharing our take on what’s changing, what’s valuable and the pitfalls we inevitably fall into along the way.
Today, I’m turning attention to AI and the reasons I believe we’re going to need designers more than ever.
In the early years of Unfold (the late 2010s) it felt like ‘UX’ was really having a moment. There was a lot of discourse around the value to be unlocked in making digital products work seamlessly, rather than just functionally.
That is still very much true today, but recently I’ve noticed a very different reason why UX continues to be such a valuable, and in my humble opinion, still overlooked part of the process for startups and fast-growing businesses.
When building was the “expensive” bit
For years, the main job of good UX was making sure you built the right thing. That mattered because building was slow and expensive. If you got it wrong, you found out the hard way – after the weeks and the budget were long gone.
So we put the time in early, with research, discovery and design, because it’s a great deal cheaper to change your mind on a wireframe than it is halfway through a build.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
Along with the rest of the industry, we’re still figuring out and evolving our approach to AI. One clear thing we are seeing though, is the rise in prospective clients arriving at Unfold having already built a working prototype using an AI tool.
Developing these prototypes further so they are ready to be rolled out to potentially thousands of customers is a topic for another blog post, but the point I want to make here is that AI has quietly (or loudly if you spend time on LinkedIn) made adding features to a product something you can prompt and have finished before the kettle has even boiled.
And that is literally incredible… magic if you will. However, the designer in me is worried – and not in an ‘AI is going to replace me’ kind of way – but in a ‘is this going to create a better end result?’ kind of way.
That old friction of “this’ll take days to develop, so let’s be sure” was quietly doing us all a favour. It made you stop and think, “is this a good idea?”.
Take it away, and it becomes very easy to just say yes. Yes to the extra feature, yes to the late change, yes to the nice-to-have, because none of it costs much to do.
How products quietly bloat
That’s how products get bloated. Not through one bad decision, but through a hundred reasonable ones. Every feature makes sense on its own but together can turn something clean into something busy, and harder to use.
I’m worried we’re developing a near-insatiable appetite for features without stopping to ask whether we actually need them. AI makes that appetite far easier to feed.
The case for designers has never been greater
None of what I’m saying here should be misinterpreted as an argument against moving fast.
We still want to ship quickly and get things in front of real users early – that has always been our way of working. It’s more that the speed should buy you time to think, not replace the thinking altogether.
The question was never really “can we build this?” That’s the easy one, and these days the answer is nearly always yes. The one worth sitting with is “should we – does this actually make the thing better, or just bigger?”
And that’s why I feel stronger than ever that the need for real, human design input is vital to the success of any digital product.
We must keep asking questions, talking to users, challenging assumptions and ensure that being deliberate remains at the core of what we do, even when cost doesn’t dictate that it must be.
This article was written by Harry, MD and founder of Unfold. If you’re wrestling with what to build (and just as importantly, what to leave out) that’s exactly the sort of thing Unfold can help with. Come and have a chat or check out our UX design or user research services.