Innovator’s Dilemma Hits Design: Growing Capabilities of AI-Driven Amateur Design Tools

Summary: As AI-powered tools like Freepik and Canva advance and empower amateur designers, is the era of professional designers coming to an end? This exposé uncovers the latest developments in amateur design capabilities and questions the future of the UX industry. Are you prepared for the impending creative revolution?

Freepik is a midrange AI image tool that aims to be more usable than more capable but more complex tools like Midjourney and Leonardo. Despite its name, Freepik is not free, at least not if you want its full feature set. Two interesting pieces of news about this product: it adds an upgraded AI image model and a service targeted at producing design deliverables for people who are domain experts instead of professional designers.

Is the era of the professional designer coming to an end? With these latest advancements in AI-driven design tools, we might be witnessing the beginning of a seismic shift in the creative industry. As these tools become more sophisticated, the line between amateur and professional design is blurring — and it's time for UX professionals to sit up and take notice. Disruptive innovation isn’t just a theory: it’s about to hit designers. It’s exactly because you sneer at the design quality currently produced by the likes of Canva and Freepik that you need to worry.

AI design is starting at the low end but eating its way up the market. (Freepik Flux)

Freepik Now with Flux

Freepik wasted no time in including the new Flux AI image model in their toolkit, launching this feature only about a week after Flux hit the market. (Bravo for moving fast.) For the sake of comparison, here are two images for the prompt “funny cartoon comparing a computer mouse and a real mouse”:

Cartoon made with Freepik’s original Pikaso image model in May 2024.

Cartoon made with Freepik’s implementation of the Flux model in August 2024.

In this small experiment, I prefer the original Pikaso model because it’s funnier, though Flux’s real mouse is probably the better drawing of that animal. Also, for a computer mouse to be compared with a real mouse, it needs to have a “tail.” It can’t be a cordless model, as shown by Flux.

Freepik Designer

My second piece of Freepik news may not be that new — I simply stumbled upon it when investigating Freepik’s new Flux offering, so I don’t know when it was originally launched. Freepik now has a feature called Freepik Designer, which creates simple designs like PowerPoint slides and social media graphics.

Professional designers don’t need to worry yet. Freepik Designer can’t create the kind of highly polished and highly branded campaigns that big brands pay big money to have designed. But that’s now. Every year over the next decade as AI effective compute and associated capabilities increase exponentially, these AI design tools will eat their way up the food chain. Right now, they can make simple social media posts for small companies and individual influencers. Two years from now, they can make simple campaigns and tradeshow collateral for mid-sized businesses. And in 10 years, I bet that even the richest brand will rely heavily on these tools.

My expectation is that for small and mid-sized businesses, AI design tools will be used by the actual professionals who need design for their job: anything from marketing professionals to a product manager presenting a new product idea to company leadership. In the biggest companies, old-school dedicated designers will still be the ones driving the AI design tools in collaboration with their non-designer colleagues who need design done.

Freepik now offers the new image-generating model Flux and also launched Freepik Designer for making simple designs like PowerPoint slides. This image created with the Flux model in Freepik, with a prompt to show a robot presenting a slide with a (made-up) pie chart of the relative use of the various Freepik features. (In fairness, note that this is an image of a presentation of a pretend PowerPoint slide, not an actual slide produced with Freepik Designer.)

Freepik vs Canva: Two Models for Building AI-driven Design Services

Canva is a more popular service where amateur designers make simple deliverables. Canva started years ago and has a very wide range of pre-AI design tools. Canva recently acquired leading AI visual tool Leonardo and is in the process of changing its design tools to be AI based. This sets up an interesting tension between Freepik and Canva who are coming at the problem from opposite ends:

• Freepik started with a range of AI tools, such as image generation, upscaling, and background removal. It is now adding design tools.

• Canva started with a range of design tools and is now adding AI capabilities.

Both companies will hopefully end up with a set of great AI-based design tools. And hopefully, these tools will be integrated rather than being a grab-bag of independent tools. Who will win? Hard to say now. In general, I think it’s better to start with a strong AI base and then add specialized features for easily designing various specialized deliverables. On the other hand, Canva has a huge installed base and strong connections to the market of amateur designers from whom they can learn what’s needed.

Adding a color-picker tool to a traditional Swiss Army knife and may not be the best way to build an integrated AI design tool. But which approach will win the day? (Freepik Flux)

Innovator’s Dilemma: Will Professional Designers Be Disrupted?

The tension between professional designers and Freepik and Canva’s amateur design tools is a classic example of the Innovator’s Dilemma, as popularized by Clayton Christensen.

Disruptive innovation proceeds through these stages:

1. Initial focus on underserved or overlooked markets: Disruptive innovations often begin by targeting customers at the bottom of the market who are less demanding or have lower budgets.

2. Initially underpowered products: The new products or services may initially be considered inferior to existing solutions in terms of traditional performance metrics.

3. Gradual improvement: Over time, these innovations improve in quality and performance, eventually meeting the needs of mainstream customers.

4. Market disruption: As the innovation improves, it begins to attract more customers, eventually displacing established market leaders.

5. New value proposition: Disruptive innovations often offer benefits like lower costs, greater convenience, or simplicity compared to existing products.

Past examples of this process include:

• Personal computers disrupting mainframe and mini-computers

• Cellular phones disrupting fixed-line telephony

• Digital music downloads disrupting compact discs

Early personal computers had a tiny fraction of the power of mainframe computers. Most professional computer scientists considered them mere toys. (Freepik Flux)

In the design market, we’re currently in stage 2 of the 5-step disruption process. Similar to the time of the Apple II personal computer (good enough for simple games, but not good enough to run even a small business — until VisiCalc happened in 1979) or digital music downloads before the advent of MP4 players.

Any professional designer will look down his or her nose at the social media graphics created by Canva today. But we’re already entering stage 3, with AI improving the design quality of amateur designs at a good clip. I am ecstatic that there will be more good design in the world and that more people are becoming creators. I remember when cell phones were the size (and weight) of a large brick and were only owned by high-paid executives like my Dad. It’s better now when they fit in a pocket and cheap Chinese models sell for $100 in Africa.

Traditional design toolbox vs. AI design toolbox: a classic example of the innovator's dilemma. Professional designers currently hold the high ground, but the disruptive innovation of AI design services that target amateur designers with simpler and cheaper features may be charging up that hill soon enough. (Freepik Flux)

The time for passive observation is over. AI design is setting the stage for a new era in UX design, and we must act now to shape its direction. Experiment with these new tools, push their boundaries, and discover how they can enhance your creative process. Share your experiences with the community, contribute to the ongoing dialogue about AI in design, and be an active participant in defining the future of our profession.

The death of UX design as we know it isn’t something to mourn, but to celebrate. This is our opportunity to transcend the limitations of our human capabilities, to become something more — orchestrators of AI, interpreters between machine efficiency and human desire. The future of UX is not pixel-perfect mockups or carefully crafted wireframes, but our ability to guide and shape the output of AI tools. The world of UX is changing rapidly, and it's up to us to ensure that change leads to better, more human-centered design. The future is coming, with or without us — let’s make it a future we're proud to create.

The fork in the road: even if you’re the market leader, a focus on business as usual with incremental improvements leads to sustaining innovation that is eventually overtaken by the upstarts’ disruptive innovation, even if those upstarts are currently behind. (Ideogram)

About the Author

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a usability pioneer with 41 years experience in UX and the Founder of UX Tigers. He founded the discount usability movement for fast and cheap iterative design, including heuristic evaluation and the 10 usability heuristics. He formulated the eponymous Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience. Named “the king of usability” by Internet Magazine, “the guru of Web page usability” by The New York Times, and “the next best thing to a true time machine” by USA Today.

Previously, Dr. Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and a Member of Research Staff at Bell Communications Research, the branch of Bell Labs owned by the Regional Bell Operating Companies. He is the author of 8 books, including the best-selling Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (published in 22 languages), the foundational Usability Engineering (27,314 citations in Google Scholar), and the pioneering Hypertext and Hypermedia (published two years before the Web launched).

Dr. Nielsen holds 79 United States patents, mainly on making the Internet easier to use. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Human–Computer Interaction Practice from ACM SIGCHI and was named a “Titan of Human Factors” by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

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