Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to revolutionize how we work. And as with all new technologies, there are two sides to the story. Applying AI to user experience design presents the risk of UX Theatre.

What is UX Theatre?

I originally wrote about UX Theatre in 2018, where I defined it as: ‘the application of any sort of design methodology without including a single user in the process, or including users but merely for show.” Often, this is caused by a lack of support for UX by executives or a lack of design maturity in an organization, which undercuts the ability of development teams to include users in the design of products and services.

In the context of AI use in design, UX Theatre results when organizations apply AI tools in their development process in a way that mimics or creates the appearance of user-centered design without actually involving real users.

Now, designers might wonder: Why would anyone substitute user-centered design with AI? Money, time, simplicity—the usual reasons why UX teams have been facing underfunding or cuts for years.

The Allure of AI in UX Design

The tech industry promises that AI will make our lives easier. AI seems to offer a quick solution to the complex problem of conducting user research, cutting out the time required to recruit and interact with actual users, analyse the results, and generate insights. Especially compared to the shortcuts AI can seemingly afford by throwing some prompts into a chatbot trained on the full body of knowledge otherwise known as the Internet. Or generating detailed user personas based on a given data set. Or analysing results and generating insights from unmoderated testing. Or even mimicking user behaviour, generating user tasks, or creating any other design inputs.

The potential time and cost savings come at the expense of genuine user insights (and result in UX Theatre). This is in addition to the known issues about the inherent biases and “hallucinations” that AI platforms have been shown to infuse into their results (and in turn which would be introduced into the designs that would rely on them).

How can designers prevent AI-generated UX Theatre?

Thankfully, designers can combat AI-generated UX Theatre in the same way as they can combat any UX Theatre. Here’s a list of 6 actions we can take:

1. Call out UX Theatre and offer alternatives – Point out when AI is being applied in a way that creates UX Theatre. New users of AI might not even understand the implications.
2. Combat resistance with information – Create learning opportunities to help educate stakeholders on AI-generated UX Theatre.
3. Make design participatory – Involve stakeholders in user research and design so they can understand the value of learning from actual users (instead of AI-generated ones).
4. Focus on learning and growth – Get excited that stakeholders are interested in UX (even if they are going about it the wrong way :).
5. Design your design team – Build UX teams with a variety of practitioners and roles, to reduce the temptation to replace a key UX skill with AI.
6. Evangelize to the executive level – Help execs understand the value of UX and the work required to generate valuable results (and how AI cannot reliably replicate interactions with real users).
7. Make UX advocacy your job

For a detailed breakdown of all 6 points, refer to the article Tackling UX theatre: What designers can do.

UX design is based on one important principle: that design requires connecting with real users. By being aware of the pitfalls of AI-generated UX Theatre, we can make sure that our designs genuinely serve user needs and expectations, rather than just pretending to be user-friendly.