If you call yourself a designer and—be honest with yourself—the bulk of your role has been the production of flat pictures of user interfaces, then I’m sorry to break it to you, but you are not designing. You are styling.
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In the same way that one writes in order to understand what one is writing, one designs in order to understand what one is designing. As Kaari Saarinen explains, “Working visually keeps me close to the problem and is slow enough [sic] gives me time to think while I work. Moving things around, testing relationships, and refining structure is not separate from the thinking. It is part of how clarity emerges.”
I have two Figma files going right now for two very different projects. And in both cases, the client or someone in their circle sent me "a vision", or "a mockup", both of which were either AI-generated or just templates that could be used for every page you’ve ever seen. I rejected both because I knew what I really wanted was to sit, think, and deeply understand these problems.
Something Beck goes on to say, claiming even the non-AI-generated apps all feel basically the same.
The apps I use to hire plumbers look and feel remarkably similar to those I use to watch skiers do backflips. Every brand feels the same, every function feels the same, every interaction feels optimised, streamlined and joyless. By any measure, these pieces of software are miracles of engineering and triumphs of logic, yet they feel profoundly underwhelming to live with.
It is possible that there is some user benefit here, where we know on websites or apps that a logo means "go home" and navigation menus are usually in the top or, if very long, the side on a desktop site. Generations of people, myself included, grew up with Jakob Neilsen saying "Don’t make [people] think", and, well, it turns out we took this too far. To the point that for years people thought websites couldn’t scroll because people wouldn’t scroll. This was never the case.
