Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4400s9a ----------------------- Got a question? Want to recommend a guest? Or do you want to tell me how the show can be better? Send me a voice message via email at [email protected] ----------------------- In this episode of Insights Unlocked, Jason Giles, VP of Design at UserTesting, chats with Andrew Hogan, Head of Insights at Figma, about the evolving role of design in the AI era. Fresh off the release of Figma’s 2025 AI Report, Andrew shares key takeaways from a survey of 2,500 designers and developers using AI in product development. The conversation covers how teams are shifting from experimentation to evaluating AI’s real-world impact, why design is more crucial than ever for AI-powered products, and how successful teams are navigating the contradictions of rapid innovation. They also dive into the rise of agentic AI, the ongoing productivity vs. quality debate, and why tight design-dev collaboration is becoming non-negotiable. Whether you're building the next-gen user experience or exploring how AI fits into your workflow, this episode is packed with insights on making AI work for your team and your users. What you’ll learn: Why 52% of builders say design is more important for AI products than traditional ones How agentic AI is emerging as the fastest-growing category—and what that means for UX The growing gap between AI’s ability to speed up work and its impact on work quality Why “measured momentum” might best describe AI’s trajectory in 2025 What high-performing teams do differently: iterate, collaborate, and stay flexible Resources & Links: Connect with Andrew Hogan on LinkedIn Andrew’s Double Click blog post Connect with Jason Giles on LinkedIn Figma’s 2025 AI Report: The year of AI at work Learn more about Insights Unlocked: usertesting.com/podcast
Chapter 1: What insights does Figma's 2025 AI Report provide?
Welcome back to the Insights Unlocked podcast. In this episode, we're diving into Figma's 2025 AI Report, the year of AI at work. With Andrew Hogan, Head of Insights at Figma, he joins User Testing's Jason Giles to explore how AI is really being used in design and development and why design is more important than ever in shaping these new tools.
It's a thoughtful, energetic conversation packed with real-world insights. Enjoy the show.
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, viewers, and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Principal Content Marketing Manager at UserTesting. Joining us today as host is Jason Giles, UserTesting's Vice President of Design. Welcome, Jason. Hello, everyone. And our guest today is Andrew Hogan. Andrew leads Insights at Figma.
His research focuses on the digital product and design industry and the ways the most successful teams work. Previously, Andrew spent seven years at Forrester, a leading research firm, analyzing the intersection of design and tech. Welcome to the show, Andrew. Thanks for having me.
Glad to be here. Andrew, it is so nice to talk again. We would love, before we dig in, you've got this big juicy report. We'd love if you could just give us a little bit of background. You've been researching the intersection of design technology for years now, first at Forrester and now at Figma. Just on a personal note, what drew you to this space?
I mean, at some point a long time ago, I learned that you could find out a lot if you spent time researching a topic, talking to people about it, trying things out. And the origin of that is actually being better at video games. A million years ago, I wanted to be better than my brother at –
a particular game um and his friends and so i did a lot of research in that and then that was just this fantastic jumping off point to the power of research and analyzing synthesis and i've just been doing that for different sets of technologies for you know now like definitely more than a decade i think we're like coming up on like two decades actually wow
Amazing. I can imagine that your perspective has evolved dramatically over that time.
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Chapter 2: How is design evolving in the AI era?
And I don't think that's that dissimilar than with mobile apps, with the internet. There's always this period of everything is different and then some things remain sort of from previous eras.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We've been obviously spending a lot of time and exploring other tools, too, to just analyze and think around how could this change the way we work. And it's interesting because so often, particularly for us, we think, well, how can I get something more realistic, quickly, higher fidelity, or actually interactive to be able to get feedback on earlier?
That makes sense. The other piece, though, is also the collaboration internally of how quickly can I generate an idea that gets across just even what I'm thinking. We look at some tools and they're like, oh my gosh, you know, you give a prompt and all of a sudden here's working code or it's a fully fledged prototype.
And sometimes that freaks people out versus like, well, wait a minute, like this just saved a PM hours in a PowerPoint slide trying to sketch out, you know, kind of just the early ideas. And I think...
It's really interesting when we have these capabilities to express ideas quickly that not only getting for customers, but also internally to help kind of generate that the collaboration or the share getting on the same page quicker. And that's the piece I'm actually really quite excited about. It's one thing to be able to get folks into a same design file.
It's another folks to start playing with something together. It reminds me a little bit we had, so when I worked on Xbox, we had dedicated design developers sitting right next there.
and you could draw all the pictures you want and it'd be beautiful but until you pushed it up onto a console and start playing with it and feeling with it like that it was just so telling one way or the other and i'm hoping that this allows us to elevate the craft so that we can feel it quicker and get be able to make some of these uh more taste making decisions um in the design the design itself so
obviously you can tell I'm pretty stoked.
You are excited. I mean, the thing you're pointing at there is also the most successful teams have this really tight design and development collaboration in the way that it works, not just in the way that it looks. And I think that's something that's really exciting and interesting about this era, because then you can get to how are we going to
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