Integrating AI into Product Design
Year: 2024 – 2025
My Role: Senior Product Designer / Design System Lead (Insider)
The Challenge
At Insider, I faced the challenge of scaling a complex SaaS product to deliver intuitive, human-centered experiences across a growing platform. This involved ensuring design consistency through a robust design system, accelerating user onboarding to improve activation rates, and meeting strict accessibility standards (with the upcoming EU Accessibility Act) – all while delivering business impact. Traditionally, tackling these areas required extensive research, iterative workshops, meticulous documentation, and countless design reviews. For example, understanding user needs meant hours of interviewing and note-taking; improving onboarding involved crafting and refining copy and storyboards; and auditing our design system for accessibility could be extremely time-consuming. When you have the luxury of time, these traditional methods work well – but I often did not have that luxury. I needed to move fast without compromising quality or inclusivity.
AI for Scalable, Human-Centered Impact
How AI Supercharged My Design Process
Like many modern designers, I embraced advanced AI tools not to replace my creativity, but to accelerate tedious steps and augment decision-making. In fact, integrating AI into my workflow became a competitive advantage: a recent study by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon found that AI tools are becoming common in design, and designers who leverage them thoughtfully are especially valuable. Below are several ways I used AI to work smarter and faster, while keeping the human-centered focus of my work.
AI-Driven Accessibility Auditing
Accessibility was another critical area improved by AI. To comply with EU Accessibility Act standards, we needed to audit our product thoroughly for issues such as color contrast, screen reader compatibility, and more. Manually checking every screen against WCAG guidelines is painstaking; fortunately, new AI-powered accessibility tools streamlined this process. We used Stark, an accessibility tool integrated into our design workflow, which leverages AI to automatically check color contrast, typography sizing, and overall design accessibility in real time.
Ensuring our designs are inclusive is an area where AI proved tremendously helpful. For example, in one of our illustrations, we included accessibility audit icons—such as contrast ratio meters, assistive device simulations, and compliance checkmarks—highlighted in electric cyan. AI tools can automatically:
Flag low color contrast issues
Identify missing alt text on images and other non-text content
By embedding these checks into our workflow, we ensured that the design itself is inherently high-contrast and accessible. Even the dark background with neon highlights in our scene reinforced this, as high contrast is crucial for users with low vision.
Tools: Strack
AI-Assisted UX Research
In our product design workflow, AI plays a key role in speeding up and deepening user research. Instead of manually transcribing and coding every user interview, we integrate AI tools that automatically process recordings, extract key themes, and surface actionable insights.
AI speeds up UX research by transcribing and analyzing user interviews, extracting key themes, and highlighting pain points using tools like Notably AI, Dovetail, and Otter.ai. Summaries and clustering in Notion AI or ChatGPT turn qualitative insights into actionable design priorities. AI also links findings with analytics (e.g., Mixpanel) for evidence-based decisions, letting designers focus on interpretation rather than manual data work.
Tools: Notably AI, Dovetail, Otter.ai
AI-Generated Content & UX Writing
Floating dialog bubbles in the scene denote AI-assisted UX writing and content creation. AI’s natural language abilities are a powerful asset in UX design, helping draft interface copy, microcopy, or error messages quickly. For example, generative AI can propose multiple text alternatives for a call-to-action or onboarding tutorial, which the designer can then refine. In our case study illustration, these content bubbles with edit cycles signify an AI writing assistant brainstorming and iterating on UX copy. The result is a faster content design process – AI drafts the words while human designers ensure the tone and meaning stay on-brand.
Tools: ChatGPT (GPT-4)
Summary
At Insider, I integrated AI into research, UX copywriting, and design systems to boost speed, quality, and accessibility. As Senior Product Designer and Design System Lead, I used tools like NotebookLM, Figma AI, and GPT to streamline workflows, ensure EU Accessibility Act compliance, and empower a 6-designer team.