We Were Looking at the Same Screen
Recently, a stakeholder showed me a design generated by AI.
He liked it.
To be honest, if the same design had come from my team, I probably wouldn’t have approved it.
What surprised me wasn’t the design itself.
It was the realization that we were looking at the exact same screen, yet seeing completely different things.
And neither of us was wrong.
For him, the screen already did what it needed to do.
The layout was there.
The buttons were there.
The content was there.
Most importantly, it helped him visualize an idea quickly.
In that sense, the design had already succeeded.
For me, however, the questions were only beginning.
Would users know where to look first?
Is the information hierarchy clear enough?
Are we presenting too much information at once?
Will users understand the next action without thinking?
Does the page build trust?
Can we make the experience simpler?
The difference wasn’t about taste.
It was about what we were optimizing for.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that one of the biggest challenges in design isn’t creating solutions.
It’s aligning expectations.
A stakeholder might be looking for clarity.
A product manager might be looking for functionality.
A designer might be looking for visual quality.
A product designer might be looking for user understanding.
Everyone can look at the same screen and come away with a different conclusion.
And all of them can be valid.
AI has made this even more visible.
A few years ago, producing a design took time.
Today, anyone can generate a decent-looking interface within minutes.
The barrier to creating screens has become dramatically lower.
But something else happened.
The easier it became to generate solutions, the more obvious it became that we don’t always agree on what a good solution looks like.
The bottleneck is no longer creation.
It is judgment.
This has also changed the way I think about the role of designers.
If our job is simply to make screens look better, then AI will continue getting better at that every year.
And honestly, it should.
But I don’t believe that’s where the real value of design comes from.
The value of design lies in understanding people.
In reducing complexity.
In organizing information.
In helping users make decisions with confidence.
In turning something functional into something intuitive.
Most of the time, users don’t notice these things.
They simply feel that a product is easy to use.
That feeling is rarely accidental.
Perhaps the most interesting thing AI has done is not challenge our ability to create.
It has challenged our ability to judge.
When everyone can generate answers, the real question becomes:
How do we know which answer is the right one?
And maybe that’s a question worth spending more time on than the technology itself.