Subscribe to our blog

Is Web Design Automation Going to Replace Human Designers?

March 01, 2018
4 min reading time

Web design is already a saturated and highly competitive field, but now a new type of designer might be poised to steal all the work. They don’t have 15-step beard care regimes, they don’t wear statement socks, and they don’t listen to obscure bands that “you’ve probably never heard of”. They don’t take lunch breaks, they don’t vape and they love protocol. Scariest of all though, they’re capable of instantly redesigning a website for every user, based on data-driven ideas of what each user wants to see. Web design automation, powered by machine learning-based AI, has officially left the realm of sci-fi. Tech heads and creatives around the world are beginning to accept that the dream of having a website which rearranges and repopulates itself according to the predicted preferences of each user, may soon be a reality. So, is AI-driven design going to be the end of human web designers? Probably not.

Designing for Brats    

Users are spoiled brats. We know this because we’re all users too. It’s easy to feel like just hours after rolling out a new feature, it becomes something that users expect, then they want more innovation. Personalization is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Remember when a website greeting you by name was impressive? You should, because that was cool only a few years ago. Now, users get annoyed when YouTube’s content recommendation engine serves even a single video they don’t enjoy, or when their favorite news site shows them stories on international politics when it should know they only care about sports.

Digital media and e-commerce companies aren’t pressurizing themselves into creating increasingly personalized user experiences, users are doing that. Personalization empirically improves the effectiveness of everything from featured content sections to remarketing emails, so failing to personalize is failing to keep up with user expectations, and we all know where that leads.

Why are we talking about all this? Because the relentless user demand for more personalization is the reason AI-driven web design is such an attractive concept to web companies across the board. While making e-commerce recommendations that seem like mind-reading might feel impressive today, it’s only a matter of time until you’re competing with sites that can even dynamically change color schemes according to user preference. So, should you sell your graphics tablet to pay for a plumbing course right now? Not so fast.

Web Design Automation and the New Web Designer

Maybe computers can process data way faster than any human outside the Marvel universe, but they still struggle with creativity. So, for the foreseeable future at least, they’ll still need humans to do what humans do best. Data scientists will still need to help machine learning AI systems translate behavioral data into human-readable insights. Then, it will still be up to designers to create the elements that can be dynamically placed and scaled by the system. Digital designers are still going to have an important place in the design process, but fulfilling it is going to require a fundamental shift in design thinking.

The fact is, the technology on its own won’t bring any value to your design team, nor will it solve any design challenges on its own. The only way to tap into the power of AI-assisted design and the endless possibilities that it opens up, is to find smart applications for the technology that support existing business goals and systems. In other words, web design automation isn’t going to be some kind of miraculous gateway to a perfect, more personalized website or app for everyone. It’s more like a tool that will still require expertise and knowledge to operate. No one thinks tools like Photoshop make people better designers, right?  

So, if the focus is going to shift away from finished, static designs and towards creating a range of assets that an automated web designer can pull from, then understanding user needs and motivations is going to be more important than ever. It’s going to fall to designers to give AI-driven systems the training, guidance and tools they need to improve web design, rather than undermine it.

It’s difficult to overstate the impact that machine learning and AI have had on web design and what users expect from their online experience. It’s now clear that these technologies aren’t just a fad that is going to be irrelevant in a few years. Instead, they have come to influence almost every aspect of doing business online and have largely defined the direction that marketing teams around the world are taking. So it’s not surprising that these technologies are set to change the way we think about design, and provide ways to overcome design challenges we once thought insurmountable.

If you’re ready to see what possibilities machine learning-driven AI can open to your design team, perhaps it’s time to speak to an expert at Liftigniter.

Ready To Learn More?

Schedule a 15 minute demo today and see how LiftIgniter can increase conversions, improve subscription rate and drive user engagement for your site without building new infrastructure.

Request Demo