Can AI Make UX Design More Human?

Just days after landing back from San Francisco, which is quickly becoming the new Silicon Valley for AI, we sat down with Ioana Teleanu for a live conversation on the future of design.

If you work in product or design, you've likely come across Ioana. She's the founder of UX Goodies with over 300,000 followers across all her platforms, the first AI product designer at Miro, and played a key role in launching UiPath’s Clipboard AI, named one of Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2023. She now runs the world’s largest course on AI for designers.

Ioana shared stories about the AI buzz in San Francisco, why she still prefers taking notes with pencil and paper, and what it felt like to nearly lose her creative spark using Midjourney. Her message was clear. AI is powerful, but imagination still starts with us.

The full interview is at the bottom of the page; and if you're short on time, here are a few takeaways from the conversation.

Key takeaways

• Soft learnings still matter. Emotion, context, and judgment are hard to measure, but they’re critical to good design.
• Talk to real humans. Use AI to spot patterns, but validate insights with real conversations. The nuance is usually in the unsaid.
• Run empathy checks. Ask if your design is solving a real need or just showcasing what the tech can do.
• Design for quiet AI. The most helpful AI often fades into the background. Aim to reduce friction, not add more.
• Protect your creative process. Start with your own ideas. Use AI to push or refine them, not replace them.
• Measure more than numbers. Look at trust, clarity, and ease as seriously as you track performance metrics.
• Go analogue. When things feel too digital, shift to paper or physical tools. It resets your thinking.

What you can do now

• Add an empathy check to your design process.
• Schedule two short user conversations to test one AI-based insight.
• Audit one flow to see where ambient AI could reduce friction.
• Define a soft success metric, like “felt clarity” in a post-task survey.
• Prototype something without AI, then do a single AI pass and compare.

Q&A highlights

• Figma and AI are still maturing. Early wins are mostly about speed, but many senior designers rely more on their own creative instincts.
• Cognitive psychology is highly relevant. Ioana suggests picking one topic and going deep rather than trying to learn it all at once.
• Her current tool stack includes ChatGPT-4 and 5, Claude, Granola for meetings, Midjourney for research, taste-building, and imagery, and Higgsfield AI for portraits and video effects. She also uses AI lightly in Notion, Miro, and Figma.

Watch the full session

Connect with Ioana on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ioanateleanu/

Thanks again for being part of this community. We hope the conversation sparked some new ideas and maybe even helped you feel a bit more grounded in your own process.

See you next month! Nicole and the UXCam team