The future of UX and Design
– part 3 with Erik Lövquist, Head of Design
In the first part of our series, we followed Erik Lövquist’s journey from VR labs and a PhD in Computer Science to shaping multi-layered user experiences at Quiddly. In the second part, we uncovered the principles and processes guiding our design and development work.
Now, in the final chapter, we look ahead. What role will AI play in the evolution of UX? Will design become standardised and lose its spark, or will we see entirely new directions emerge?
Join us as Erik shares his thoughts on the big questions shaping the future of design at Quiddly.
How AI-mature is Quiddly in its design process
We realise it’s a broad question, since “AI maturity” can mean many things. AI might be used as an efficiency tool, generating drafts, testing flows, or summarising large quantities of input, meetings and documentation. It might also act as a creative sparring partner, drilling into specific topics.
According to Erik, we’re seeing many promising seeds in AI and design. Some things still leave a bit to be desired, but we might just be closing in at warp speed and a breakthrough.
I use AI daily. From a design perspective I primarily use it as a UX writer. It excels at shaping labels, text snippets and other help texts in the UI. It enables me to spend more time on UX design rather than copywriting. I also use it to summarise output from workshops and as a virtual colleague to bounce ideas with.
AI for actual design work?
Freeing up time from monotonous tasks on the periphery of our expertise is the first step in supercharging productivity with AI. Like many technical innovations before it, AI allows experts to focus more on where they create the most value. But what about the next steps? Is AI good enough to generate designs and explore creative concepts on a deeper level?
I occasionally test AI to generate actual design, but it’s not quite there yet. However, I expect AI to soon be able to make design suggestions based on our design system. Things are evolving rapidly and I’ve seen promising indications for design work specifically.
Erik explains that one major challenge is getting AI to generate designs that are coherent and follow a design system. It can produce decent drafts based on prompts, but once placed in a larger context or re-used, things quickly become too complex. And then there’s the code side, but that’s a whole other story, perhaps for another Quiddler to tell.
Although I use AI as a sparring partner regularly, from a creative perspective I find it a bit stale. I still prefer to run and test ideas with real people. It hasn’t replaced UX workshops or the joint brainstorming process for generating new ideas.
The Big Questions
As always with rapid developments, it’s hard to fully grasp the changes when you’re standing in the middle of them. Still, we ask: in what direction could AI take UX and design? What are the risks? And what advice does Erik have for the next generation of UX professionals?
There’s a risk, he admits, that AI could stifle innovation and that designers fall into the “shiny new thing” syndrome, overusing a hyped tool simply because it’s there. This risk exists both as a work tool and, perhaps more critically, as a feature in products. We’ve all seen how suddenly every company claims to be “AI-first.”
We lower our glasses, lean forward in the worn chesterfields towards Erik, and ask: how do you prevent AI features from becoming gimmicks rather than delivering genuine user value?
The answer is simple yet elegant: by anchoring design in real user needs and actual context. If AI solves a genuine user need in a way that delivers more gain or pain relief than a non-AI feature, then it will be useful.
We also ask if Erik fears AI will standardise design further and limit innovation.
We’re already in a place where design has become quite standardised, and yes, there is a risk that AI trained on these patterns will amplify that trend.
But, he adds, it’s now up to design practitioners to step up and challenge themselves to find ways of pushing UX into new territories. However, how we should design for AI usage in systems is not yet standardised. So there is still plenty of room for innovation.
The Bigger Picture
If we zoom out even further: in 30 years’ time, what will tech historians say about Quiddly’s solutions, our evolution and contribution? What will be Erik’s and Quiddly’s legacy?
Erik smiles, eyes sparkling, and answers without hesitation:
Customers will in the future say that the system helped them radically reduce the time spent on each invoice, minimised the effort required to handle payments, optimised debtors’ willingness to pay, and freed up time and resources to focus on business innovation.
Indeed … well-thought-through words, shaped by countless in-house workshops, iterations, and hard work defining Quiddly’s core and aligning all teams. From a design perspective, he explains, this will be achieved by identifying and streamlining the tasks that consume the most time and effort, then ideating novel solutions and design approaches for key financial decisions.
Wrapping Up
All good things must come to an end – and so does our session with Quiddly’s Head of Design. Even after hours of conversation, it’s clear we’ve only scratched the surface of UX design’s complexity. We’re still at the beginning of a larger evolution that could transform the craft – not at its core, but in how it is practised as a profession, and in its surrounding, overlapping parts.
As a final question, we ask Erik what advice he’d give to younger designers entering UX. He smiles and delivers a rock-solid line:
Learn the rules and then break them. Study the basic patterns from the big players, but don’t be afraid to gamble with creativity rather than playing it too safe.
Want to learn more about Quiddly’s solutions?
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Our solutions supercharge the whole organization, all the way from management, to operations and tech. We have specialists inside Quiddly that are used to communicate with these different key functions and maximize the output of our solutions.
Feel free to visit our solutions page to learn more about our three modules for Invoicing, Factoring and Debt Collection.