I’ll admit, I wasn’t exactly the first to hop on the ChatGPT or MidJourney AI bandwagon. “So we are just plugging in cheat codes for our jobs and remote controlling what will eventually replace all of us now?” … Slow down. Take a deep breath. Allow yourself to properly embrace the next wave of tech.

The Opportunities & Challenges of AI in UX

Although intriguing and sometimes impressive, AI image generators are not something that I use for projects, personally, but are they fun? Yeah. Will Adobe Firefly and Midjourney play a consistent role in my everyday work? Probably not.

Rather than filling out search queries and prompts to generate an image to be used directly in designs, I’ve found that the best use of AI resources is to generate quick ideas, brainstorm visual solutions, and get top-level inspiration.

. And if you treat AI as a whole, as just that - another tool. That’s when you can unlock its full potential.

By the end of this blog, you’ll have a deeper understanding of four robust AI-powered tools, their best uses, and how (through my experience) not to use them. If used correctly, these resources can significantly streamline your workflow, help you take advantage of insightful analytics and historical data, and above all, empower you to take your designs to the next level.

4 Efficient & Highly-Effective AI Powered Figma Plugins

“Generates copy with ChatGPT in Figma or FigJam! Easily change the style, length, or formatting of text in just one click.”

! This has proved to be VERY useful in the early stages of design when content is still being generated. FigGPT allows you access to (literally) a magic button to populate your layouts with placeholder copy. You can provide specific prompts, adjust tone, fix grammar, ask for a shorter or lengthened copy around the same subject, and even “improve writing”.

. Often, you’re approaching content design with a content outline, but not necessarily completed 

 for the whole site. This allows you to have related copy to the project / outline and generate desired length / tone to guide the content creator.

 And yes, that includes long-form copy, clever headlines, or introduction paragraphs. It can help to quickly generate ideas to spark inspiration.

 I would never hit the “magic button” and call it a day.

 is another great resource that I’ve used for the same reasons listed above.

“Artificial intelligence instantly predicts where users will look after engaging with your design. Learn if a CTA button is visible enough, conduct A/B testing to see which object attracts the most attention, and create better UX based on data.”

This one is pretty neat, but you have to know how to use it. It’s based on data and predictions. Not necessarily reality. Essentially you select a frame of a full-page design, select what type of website it is (e-commerce, marketing, landing page, etc), Attention Insight does its thing and VOILA! You have fully generated heatmaps and focus maps of your design, predicting where users will be drawn to look.

 To make sure your layout decisions are accessible and support conversion goals. There is value in using a ton of historical data to predict user outcomes. Use it as a measuring stick early on in the design process to help you make decisions.

This should not replace post-launch analytics and/or performance metrics.

 You are putting a lot of trust in the plugin’s algorithm and while I’m sure they spent a ton of research making sure this is reliable, it shouldn’t replace the tried and true.

“WireGen uses chat GPT AI to generate wireframe designs quickly and easily. Just input the description of the design you want to create, and the plugin will generate wireframes for you in minutes. Not satisfied with the first result? Simply ask the AI to change something, or generate with a slight change in the prompt.”

I have a very specific way I go about conducting wireframes and setting things up for a smooth transition into design. This plugin could never replace that but it does act as a really fun tool for fast idea generation and could help you get unstuck if you are in a layout / UX rut.

Quickly iterate on ideas and layout / content decisions.

 It spits out full layouts that insinuate UI, component needs, CTA placement and copy. It’s possible that it could generate a layout decision based on its algorithm and data trove that you may not have previously thought of.

It’s not meant to be a final deliverable or replace wireframing

. It can’t take into account all of the strategy work that you’ve done to get to wireframes. User flows, personas, sitemap, etc.

“Build custom drag and drop automations that do time-sensitive Figma tasks for you in one click.”

This is a super powerful tool. Unfortunately, it costs money, but it does offer a free trial. Essentially, it allows you to build automation based on a preset number of specific 

. So trivial and repetitive adjustments to layout that would usually be a bit time-consuming and mind-numbing can be accomplished in a single click. Either create your own customized automation or use a library of pre-made actions.

Create custom automations that cater to your workflow. 

You can save time by combining batch actions, commonly performed.

 I use it for creating batch actions, BUT there is so much more. You can convert designs into skeleton or loading pages, generate full-style guides from designs, import data/content from Airtable, etc. I’m just breaching the surface of its potential. Maybe I’ll report back with additional findings 🙂

There is no doubt that AI has generated mixed perceptions. It’s powerful and impressive but it can also be seen as compromising originality and creativity. No matter how you feel about it, one thing seems certain - It’s not going anywhere.

, 80% of business executives claim that their businesses will adopt AI technology between 2020 to 2027.

At the end of the day, I think it’s less about what AI does and more about how you use it. The purpose of AI resources for designers (in their current state) should be to improve workflow, create efficiencies and save you time. 

Let AI technology carry the weight of some of that grunt work. 

Let it perform some of those routine operations. Let it act as inspiration to help you reach a more creative solution, faster. AI provides designers with a competitive advantage if used properly. It’s not here to replace us. It’s here to help us.

“As long as we are designing for humans, we’ll always need human designers.”

AI is here to stay. We are here to stay. Let’s figure out how we can work together.

 if you have any questions or want to talk about how we can help your business navigate this next wave of tech. 

UX / UI

Web Design

4 AI Resources To Add To Your UX Design Toolbox

When talking about something complex, I’m a big fan of using relatable metaphors. In this instance, I’ll pull from art at its most basic level.

Everyone has taken a stab at filling a blank page or canvas with something, right? A pencil sketch in a notebook or a coloring page where you filled in shapes. Web design, like art, has countless mediums, layers to expression, and varying levels of complexities. So, what’s the equivalent of a beginner wanting to learn to draw by following a tutorial and sketching a simple still-life in a notebook? Probably Wix or Squarespace using a basic template. And that’s totally fine. It gets the job done. But: hundreds, if not thousands have followed that same tutorial and drawn that same still-life, just like thousands of others have used that same template.

What’s a much more complex expression? Having a full team — designer, developer, account manager, content strategist, etc and starting with a blank project in Figma. It’s a different beast. Just as an artist stares at a blank canvas on their easel. You haven’t created anything yet, but you have every resource imaginable at your disposal. You get to create the rules. You’re not coloring within the lines because you are the one creating the lines.

Intimidating? Maybe. Rewarding? Hell yeah.

Enough of the Romanticism. What is a Design System?

Example of an open source, Figma Community Design System

A set of rules and guidelines that act as a single source of truth for digital interpretation of your brand. 

 is essentially a complex digital brand guide. The building blocks for any web work.

The Layers (No Pun Intended) of a Design System

I can’t break this down any better than Brad Frost did in his 

Source: Brad Frost’s Atomic Design Methodologies, Chapter 2 on Atoms, Molecules, Organisms, Templates & Pages

 represent base-level, foundational elements of your design system. Things like the brand’s logo, color palette, and typography.

 are basic rules and standards around combinations of atoms. Think of a color assigned to a specific header style. Or a border-radius applied to all shapes/masks.

 are combinations of atoms and molecules that come together to build more complex clusters. Essentially organisms = components.

 are then pieced together using your collection of organisms.

. The brand guidelines are your dictionary no matter the medium - From a t-shirt design to your brand’s website. It should all follow the same language.

 within your system are your foundations - Color, typography, specifications like spacing, border radiuses, effects such as drop shadows, iconography, illustration, etc.

or core elements should be things like buttons, link styles, radio buttons, toggles, form fields, etc.

are when all of the above come together. UI elements are used with foundational tokens, which are combined using specific standards of implementation that create a cohesive, flexible, and scalable system with infinite potential.

Ok. That was a lot to digest. What does this mean for you? For your team? For your clients?


1. Better interdisciplinary collaboration

To create a design system, specifically in Figma, is to bring together teams and form a shared language. For example, designing on a component level gives designers a single source of truth to extend across multiple pages, creating consistency and holding yourself accountable. It also gives developers 1 “thing” to build, with rules and guidelines around it so that work isn’t being duplicated.

All components and tokens are stored globally, so instead of varying fills and hex codes floating around, you are applying singular, global styles. Everything is centralized. You have your puzzle pieces at your disposal and so does dev. Likewise, say you bring a new designer onto the team or introduce a new account manager to the project. There is a centralized repository for knowledge sharing with other designers, PMs, AMs, developers, and even the client.

You have rules to follow! Want to add a component to a system? Need a new feature? Throw away the bandaids, your design system is here to help.

Scaling design, adding features, and having another designer work on a project they’re unfamiliar with. These are all things that run the risk of misalignment, accidentally introducing new styles and patterns, slight variations, and inconsistencies creating a mess in both design and code quality. But if you have a system, you create a consistent design language to be followed.

Components become a reflection of these standards. And any future addition of components follows the same guidelines to ensure consistency. For design, this means applying styles and working from your core bank of tokens and components. For development, this means not having to make code decisions. Decisions are made by pulling from a centralized bank of rules that hold design and dev accountable and create reliable user experiences.

Starting with a core set of principles to then build more complex components allows you to create changes globally without having to go back and do a ton of rework. If you are using your building blocks to construct pages, you then have a much simpler way to maintain your designs and thus, the flexibility to make changes. Go to your design token and update the style, that change is then applied across the board on all pages. Go to a global component and reorder content or change the background color. Again, global application, not a singular instance change. Using a combination of tokens and components means consistency, it means saving time and it means updating or making changes becomes a million times easier.

With a component-level approach to design and implementation, page building becomes easy. You are grabbing puzzle pieces to build out new pages, combining building blocks to enable a modular, flexible system. Likewise, developers can spend less time tediously coding out section by section of pages or adding unique features. You have a cross-departmental system that houses a single source of truth for all past, present, and future iterations of product design and development.



5. I’m a UX designer, so I have to sneak this one in. But it’s true. Having a design system improves a website’s user experience.

My goal as a designer is to spend more time-solving high-level problems and less time being consumed by busy work and pixel pushing. Figma and a component-level approach to design help me accomplish both of these. Strategy and UX collaboration work are done upfront. You solve the most complex issues and answer complicated user questions at the beginning of the project to inform the remaining work. This becomes your guiding star for building out a design system. 

It gives you the parameters to build a successful system that focuses on who it is serving. 

A good design system creates a great user experience because it feels authentic, consistent, and trustworthy.

So, What Does This Have to Do With Figma?

Great question. To which I respond EVERYTHING. I get made fun of for being such a Figma fan but I can’t help it.

When I started in Sketch, I immediately fell in love. It was the first design software that told me web design was what I wanted to be doing. I could create vectors like in Illustrator but I could focus solely on digital and UI implementation without print-based features crowding the interface. I continued to use Sketch and XD in tandem for a few years before building up the courage to convert fully to Figma. And there was no going back.

What makes Figma great is collaboration. Figma was built with collaboration in mind. You can have multiple people working on the same file at the same time, it has version history so you can always reference past iterations, you can hop on a call while in the app with another contributor, or leave comments directly on designs with the chat functionality, it’s browser-based so you don’t even need to download software or have an app. I can share links to designs and/or prototypes with project managers to bring up during a presentation, or open access to clients to leave comments directly in the file. I can share a Figma link with a developer who has viewing permissions and they can comment, export assets and even “inspect” to pull CSS code directly from the designs. The list goes on.

Figma is THE tool for creating design systems for all of the reasons that design systems are so great. It comes full circle.

It offers better collaboration, it’s easier to scale designs, things like auto-layout create massive efficiencies between disciplines and the UX of the platform itself is top-notch. There’s a 

, open-source design files to be shared, team collaboration templates through 

This is a lot of Unicorn and Rainbow Talk. What's the Catch?

Figma has a pretty steep learning curve. It can be intimidating to start in because there is just so much to learn. You have to put in the time in order to grasp some of the more complex nuances and advantages that it has to offer. That being said, it’s pretty easy to learn the basics and Figma offers a ton of 

I’d say the things that take the most time are learning to control 

capabilities, and building a repository of go-to 

. But that’s life, right? It takes time to get comfortable with something and Figma offers enough right off the bat to be dangerous.

This is something that I try to be conscious of every time I set out to design a website or create a design system. Creating a design system offers a framework and set of rules to create alignment and manage consistency at scale. This is all great, just as long as it’s not at the expense of creativity and innovation. The age old form / function argument. 

Craft and creativity should not take a back seat to efficiency. 

Create principles and guidelines that inspire and guide. Use these to influence further exploration, experimentation, and creativity. Be consistently creative and fun. Bend the rules without breaking them.

Creating a base set of rules doesn’t have to be boring. Be happy with a kickass solution and then use that as your status quo. Go back to the benefits of a design system — 

 If you need a new component don’t try to force a circle into a square. Design a new component! Define its purpose and add it to the system. It becomes another piece of your puzzle. 

Pull in some fun micro interactions. Build animation and movement 

into your system to inject life and personality. Rules don’t have to = boring product. It’s something I push myself to be better at every day.

“A system defines solutions. YOUR solutions define the system.”

at VIA for any questions or inquiries about creating a design system for YOUR brand. We have a few fun design system-based projects that will be launching in the very near future. Stay tuned!


Creating a Design System in Figma

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