Design Automation: How Will The Web-Designer Profession Change In The Coming Years?

I hear a lot of talk about the fact that soon we will all be replaced by neural networks, and this collective fear is not meaningless. Programs for designers in 2020 take on a lot – automatically generate styles and faces of people, collect UI-kits. Now there are already neural networks, which can also collect landings for the task.

It seems that soon it will be easier to go to the neural network for a conditional online store, promotional page or simple service, rather than to the designer. And all you need is a clear request as clearly as possible. Does this mean that thousands of designers will be out of work?

Generation and selection

Digital design has always been an interdisciplinary profession at the interface of technology, aesthetics, ergonomics, business requirements and (partly) management. The main skill of a designer was and still is not drawing pictures (anyone with tools could draw), but the ability to make meaningful interface hypotheses.

The designer is sharpened to invent viable and aesthetic solutions, to test them in practice, to make changes and check again. This is the mature design cycle in the development of any, if any, successful digital product.

Let’s take a close look at the first steps of the cycle. The most time is spent on implementation and generation of options. The key detail: the designer does not just generate solutions. He selects free mockups that best solve the problem, fit the conditions, fit the context, satisfy the team and the client. 

In other words, if the task “Make button more visible” is to be performed, it is not enough to invent fifty variants of color, size and position of the button. It is necessary to choose the most successful one from these variants, and then to coordinate and correct them for the specified conditions.

If you want, you may not shift this work entirely on the neural network. Under human control, it will quickly generate solutions but will not be able to select the ones that exactly fit the task. This is not because the machine is bad, but because the task is often uncertain, unclear and can change right in the process.

Besides, the neural network does not invent anything; it just compiles the result from the array of viewed data. As before, a person will be busy inventing new things and searching for development directions.

Designer’s role in the neural network world

The designer has skills that cannot be automated yet. For example, he can make a design even when the business does not have a clearly defined query. The designer can work with difficult clients, can take into account the context – the subtleties of negotiations, implementation problems, personal relationships and team preferences, accumulated non-verbalized experience.

Neural network will not be able to work in conditions of uncertainty, clarified requirements, change of deadlines and model of management, where it is often a mess, many people make decisions. And a person will be able to. And this layout is unlikely to change in the coming years.

Thus, in the foreseeable future, the main task of the designer becomes the function of selection, and the generation of solutions is semi-automatic.

From this point of view, the design cycle of the future is built on a different principle. On the first step, the designer will not generate solutions on their own, but will set the neural network of requirements and conditions under which the machine itself will quickly generate them. Further, the designer, as before, will select suitable options, modify them and test them.

What will be the result?

The designer of the future is a professional who manages the automation process. Progress in technology will change the first step of his work and increase demands on programming skills, but the profession itself and its essence will remain.

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