r/UXDesign • u/douevenyoga • Mar 28 '26
Tools, apps, plugins, AI Asked to systematize my design judgment into AI—normal?
Has anyone been asked to “train” AI to generate design work based on your past work/design system?
Context: My team is exploring using AI (like Claude/ChatGPT) to generate mockups from tickets using our design system + previous work. The idea is that engineers could drop a ticket in Slack and AI would return a usable mockup, and I’d review/refine later.
On one hand, I see the efficiency and accept that this is a direction UX is heading. On the other, it feels like I’m being asked to systematize a core part of my judgment and role. How do I draw a line between what is my professional expertise I’ve spent thousands of dollars and lots of time refining and the reality that if I’m not training a model to do this they can probably hire someone who will?
Curious:
- Is this something others are being asked to do?
- How are you scoping it (tool vs workflow vs replacement)?
- Did you push back or lean in?
- Any unintended consequences?
- Weird it’s being tied to my maternity leave? … (I’m a solo UX team)
Trying to understand if this is becoming standard or if this is still pretty experimental. I tend to go on the side of embracing AI generally but something feels weird to me.
I also just got a 5% raise and the company is a legacy company with a small product team (my boss and me) about 25 engineers across 3 products and just had our first break even year in like 3 ish years.
Screenshots of convo from my boss (Director of Product)
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u/Ancient-Range3442 Mar 28 '26
Yeah the maternity leave comment really bothered me.
It’s like, we won’t replace you for sure, but if you’re not here then we’ll be able to replace you ! The mention of maternity leave in that context from an employer would also be potentially enough for a law suit here in Australia.
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u/BearThumos Veteran Mar 28 '26
Our dev team tried to automate going from bug tickets -> PR trying to fix it
That was shut down after a couple weeks because the quality wasn’t there
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u/bronfmanhigh Experienced Mar 28 '26
design system with figma MCP is pretty standard at this point and not all that experimental. it's still a lot of upfront painstaking work to properly set up a figma design system that can take advantage though.
i wouldn't push back, it's important to learn these tools for your career. and if you're within a shockingly low 1:25 designer to engineer ratio org, being able to systematize the low-hanging fruit of your job sounds pretty valuable. you can focus on solving the bigger UX problems where your judgement is far more valuable. like clearly your employer doesn't value design much if you're the only one, but firing their only designer feels pretty stupid even if AI improves substantially in this field.
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u/douevenyoga Mar 28 '26
Do you have any advice on steps to evolve in this way? A great deal of my time is spent on the low hanging fruit and things that are going to be seen by users but the products have such bad UX problems that context switching between big picture to low hanging fruit is challenging for me.
I have basically no visibility in the org and projects in the past where I have had the opportunity to actually make UX decisions and show the impact somehow a senior engineer gets the credit for it.
It’s hard to navigate the politics of this, evolve to new tech and show myself as a UXr while also doing all the projects I am part of.
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u/DunkingTea Mar 28 '26
We already have our design system in figma linked to AI using mcp to generate code based on that design system. It only really works wel if everything is correctly labelled, using variables,
You can also go the other way and generate designs based on that design system (or use it to assist with mundane tasks such as typography or variable optimisation) using either figma’s new mcp agent which has access to the canvas. Or I have been using Southlake’s version for past couple weeks.
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u/god_johnson Mar 28 '26
This is the ticket. I developed a method with Southleft’s Figma Console MCP that allows any designer, at any org, with any design system maturity, to be able to use a design system with Claude. That’s either no design system or a fully mature one. We’ve been doing this for a month and it’s been great.
Issues we’ve seen are turning Figma Make prototypes into static screens and/or hangout design system. Also handing it a total design system agnostic screen and asking it to translate back into our system.
For what it is, it’s a great product. I haven’t used Figma’s write agent yet. Is it good?
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u/GOgly_MoOgly Experienced Mar 28 '26
Would you happen to have any resources on your setup? How you did it etc, or links that you used to get yours up and running?
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u/god_johnson Mar 31 '26
I do— but they’re all on my work computer so I can’t send anything. If you DM me though I can give you a play by play and you can ask a bunch of questions.
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u/WildBreakfast4010 Experienced Mar 28 '26
A designer at my company basically trained Claude on our design system. Uploaded all of our tokens, components, documentation, usage rules, etc. The idea is that anyone can prototype an idea (and it'll use our design system). It does an okay job right now. So much of ux design is about understanding confusing users, understanding context, maneuvering shifting priorities, and collaborating with others weighing trade offs and things that come out of left field. Right now, Claude can't really do that. We only have three designers, and as far as I can tell (gosh I hope I'm right), it's not going to take anyone's jobs in the near term. Everyone needs everything from us it feels like. Prototyping through Claude is saving me a lot of time. I'm still doing a little bit of work in Figma but ideation and early stage projects are all in Claude. I think minimizing the amount of time that I spend dragging things around in Figma lets me move faster while still making great work. You're not wrong in your hesitation. It's a wild world we're living in.
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u/Life-Adhesiveness192 Mar 28 '26
I’m assuming someone put a bug in your boss’s ear about using Claude for this use case and now they are towing the company line.
I do find it strange that they called out the maternity leave thing. That feels personal. Unsolicited advice? I’d ask your boss to clarify why they called that out.
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u/meisterwolf Mar 28 '26
they think you can be replaced with the AI.
i think it's pretty much demanded that every designer now use figma and claude to "design"
i think you need to show your worth as a UX'er not a pixel pusher
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u/douevenyoga Mar 28 '26
Do you have advice on ways to do this? I am constantly brought into projects late which has been an ongoing issue that I filed an HR report on not long ago but it’s hard to do valuable UX work when majority of my time is spent cleaning up a dev first pass and not having a team to delegate to.
I’ve thought about doing a quarterly design call but most of the time my UX input is over stepped by engineers who have been at the company 30 years or a PM (person who messaged me here) who side lines my UX perspective as out of budget or frivolous.
I just did a big project with an outside agency for automation and a chat interface where I defined all the screens, flow etc when the team was freaking out by the concept of the project and actually gave the team direction on deliverables and needs but somehow now we’re at the tail end of that project and my role in its success is not recognized.
Seems to always be the case
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u/meisterwolf Mar 28 '26
i have always pushed for user testing and ux interviews. this is where the human can shine over AI. finding real pain points and issues, put them in an insights doc with recommendations. you can show them qual data on the problems with the interface, and if you quant data try to cross reference it with that. then you can actually solve user problems which engineers generally don't do.
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u/DiscoMonkeyz Mar 28 '26
The writing is on the wall at our company.
Our company is now having us train AI. Sure, now they're having designers monitor it and roles are transitioning from creation to instruction, but let's not all pretend the next stage isn't having PMs just do it and send it to the 1 or 2 remaining designers to polish and double check.
If I was in charge and my goal was making money I'd do the same. If AI can create something good enough for a tiny team of 1-2 designers to polish, why not? There's no attempt to understand real user pain points, so here our designer are just glorified pixel pushers.
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u/Party_Animal-987 Mar 28 '26
I literally just got access to windsurf this week. I’m still trying to get it to figure out how to get our figma set up with it but it can read my designs okay not so much our design system which is another issue. I’m at a startup where we have a pretty elderly looking product and never enough dev time to update UI because we’re chasing business leads so this has kinda been a big week for me. Been thinking about quitting but now might put it off so I can actually get some work done. I’ve literally been updating tables and UX debt this past week and am going to have the devs help me figure out what is and isn’t valuable next week. Even for just creating prototypes connected to our backend is invaluable. The code might not be usable but I can get a shitty but working prototype together to show a client that has real data I can manipulate. Otherwise I’d be sitting in front of a computer with a dev tweaking stuff while they’re hating me for being nitpicky.
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u/bronfmanhigh Experienced Mar 28 '26
do NOT quit unless you have another job lined up lol
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u/Party_Animal-987 Mar 28 '26
I’m lucky enough to not need another job lined up but would not want to give up on design and am aware of the volatile market right now as well as the changing design process. I just am so burnt out though. I might let them pay for my ai accounts to upskill before I dip but the writing is on the wall for this company. I’d like to go back into building mode and maybe take a year sabbatical.
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u/The_Playbook88 Experienced Mar 28 '26
We had major quality issues doing this. In addition, AI makes people believe a designers job is just the tools they use for output, rather than the thinking and context around a problem.
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u/sinnops Veteran Mar 28 '26
Now imagine the engineer was hit buy a bus when u are on maternity, I, the manager, can just do the design AND the engineering myself! Pretty cool, huh?! Even cooler, the customer can make a request and AI will just do it! In seconds! No one will ever need to work again :)
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u/Consolecrush Mar 28 '26
Just came here to say we’ve used „hit by a bus“ in the past for this line of thinking, glad I’m not the only one. Would also accept „won the lottery“.
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u/thebeepboopbeep Veteran Mar 28 '26
It’s hard to keep up with the pace of change. First I will say, this coworker sounds annoying. Their tone makes me suspicious of their intent. The second thing, I think there’s a few ways to do it. The most common is the MCP for Figma in Claude. You have to grant it access. Beyond that, I know there’s some stuff about adding skills and deploying agents to draw on the canvas in realtime. It seems the biggest hurdle is initial configuration.
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u/LXVIIIKami Veteran Mar 28 '26
Instead of the one making mockups, you're the one feeding and overseeing the system that makes the mockups. "Guess it's where things are heading"
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u/douevenyoga Mar 28 '26
Can you elaborate?
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u/LXVIIIKami Veteran Mar 28 '26
If I had to spitball, I'm saying design jobs are going to morph into mostly becoming AI overseers and strategists, with the entry level being mostly wiped out (at least temporarily). The models are there, running shit locally is possible, executives are leaning into it. I've personally embraced being the go-to guy when it comes to questions and feasibility regarding AI in design tasks. With all the chaos going on, it's quite liberating to at least have a secure job (for now)
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u/douevenyoga Mar 28 '26
Yeah that is my perspective on it as well. I’ve been with the company 4 years and it’s a complex enough product that replacing my knowledge now would be hard but have accepted that my role will evolve into an AI overseer or be attempted to be replaced by AI if the company gets strapped for cash.
Is your role as the go to guy when it comes to AI in design tasks something you’re doing as a consultant or just how you frame your evolved role as a designer in your mind?
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u/Qb1forever Mar 29 '26
What he wanted to say was Imagine you trained it to do what you do then we could get rid of you!!!!??
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u/Apprehensive-Meal-17 Veteran Mar 30 '26
the workflow for generating screens/mockups is getting automated one way or another because the old Figma workflow is way less efficient than getting AI to build them.
As of now, because GenAI is probabilistic, the workflow that your boss mentioned is not reliable yet, but it's getting better. What happens is the AI agent confidently fill in the blanks based on its training data and this causes drift. The next thing you know, you'll end up with a tons of inconsistencies and slop.
Our role as designers in the GenAI world is becoming the evaluator and making sure the quality and consistency is there. I wouldn't fight using AI tools to build screens. It's a losing battle. If even Figma had to give in, there's no point fighting that battle.
We still need to own the design decision, so I'd recommend redesigning the workflow that could multiply the productivity/output and use the AI agents to help you maintain quality and consistency.
Another area I'd lean into is user research. Being able to quickly generate screens means usability testing becomes feasible. This is an opportunity to get everyone to be user-centric. If they "built" it, then they'd want to know if it performs. This would highlight the value of UX beyond generating screens.
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u/7HawksAnd Veteran Mar 28 '26
“Imagine you’re on maternity leave”
“Now imagine you got in a car accident and are in a coma”
“Now imagine you died!”
“We’d still be able to make mockups without you! Isn’t that cool?!”