5 Design Skills To Sharpen in the AI Era | Figma Blog

AI is changing product creation by accelerating experimentation and expanding who can participate in design. Figma argues that designers should strengthen adaptable, technology-oriented skills rather than rely only on traditional craft. The first priority is becoming fluent with AI tools and learning to prompt them effectively, while maintaining human judgment and design fundamentals.

AI Fluency and Prompting

• AI skills are becoming essential for designers and increasingly important in non-design roles such as product management, development, and marketing.
• More than half of designers and hiring managers consider AI design capabilities—such as rapid prototyping and “vibe coding”—important hiring skills.
• Among designers who adopted AI during the past year:
  • 91% say it helps them create better designs.
  • 89% say it helps them work faster.
• AI can support many activities, including:
  • Editing images directly within a workflow.
  • Building prototypes instead of writing traditional product requirements documents.
  • Testing assumptions and creating tangible artifacts for team alignment.

Writing Better Prompts

• Clear, structured prompts produce more reliable AI-generated results.
• Figma recommends organizing prompts around:
  • The task
  • Context
  • Required elements
  • Behavior
  • Constraints
• Prompting is presented as a repeatable design practice, not merely a way to get a one-off output.
• Strong prompts help turn AI into a consistent design partner rather than an unpredictable experimentation tool.

Broader Changes to Design Work

• AI is lowering barriers to participation and blurring boundaries between product roles.
• Designers are increasingly expected to work across disciplines and use AI to extend their capabilities.
• Prototyping is becoming a faster way to communicate ideas, validate assumptions, and build momentum than relying solely on written documentation.

Designers should build practical fluency with AI tools, practice structured prompting, and use prototypes to make ideas concrete—while applying their own judgment to guide and evaluate the results.