Vicky, Product Designer at Sprint
AI is a powerful tool that can enhance your design process. It won’t design your product for you or solve user problems instantly. That said, when used correctly, it can help you progress faster and identify issues sooner. It may also surprise you with new ideas. Here’s a look at practical ways AI can support various aspects of design work, that we've been using at Sprint Innovations
AI is especially useful for spotting trends and patterns in large datasets. Such as survey responses, user feedback, or customer support tickets. It can help to group information into common themes. This makes it easier to extract useful insights from large amounts of data.
Example tools: ChatGPT, Gemini, or DeepSeek
Method: Begin with a spreadsheet where each row represents a single data point. This could be a user comment, survey response, or support ticket. Using your chosen LLM, you can prompt it to:
Limitations: AI can mislabel data. You’ll need to check its output and refine prompts as needed. While the AI can speed up analysis, it doesn’t remove the need for human judgment.
An underrated use of Large Language Models or LLMs is to simulate customer interviews. They can help you ask better questions and get up to speed on industry-specific knowledge.
Example tools: ChatGPT, Gemini, or DeepSeek
How it works:
Limitations: AI is not a replacement for real customer research. Real customers will surprise you in ways AI can’t fully simulate. It can, however, help you arrive prepared and empowered so you get the most out of (often time-constrained) customer interviews.
Heat maps are visual representations of user attention, showing where people are most likely to focus on a page. In traditional usability testing, they are generated by tracking real users’ eye movements. Predictive heat maps use AI to show where users focus based on design patterns. This helps you assess your layout before testing it with real users.
There are various tools available to analyse landing or marketing pages before spending on user testing. Many of them report over 90% accuracy compared to real (non predictive) heat maps.
Example Tools:
Best for:
Not good for:
Limitations: These tools use visual pattern recognition to predict where users are likely to focus. They don’t account for authentic user intent or content clarity. Think of them as a “visual hygiene” check—ideal for catching flaws before moving to real testing.
Finding the right stock photo can take longer than expected. They can also be pricey, generic, or not quite fit your brand. AI-generated imagery gives you options. There are many AI image generation tools available, two of which have made it into my workflow.
Limitations: AI-generated photographs don’t always look right. Hands and faces often look strange, and you can't reliably recreate the same person. In high stake marketing campaigns or UX, AI photos can feel “off.” Real photos or edited stock images are often better for creating trust and relatability.
There are too many new AI wireframing and prototyping tools to list them all. The practical impact (so far) is extremely mixed. The tools worth noting, integrate with Figma or are inbuilt and can provide responsive design ideas.
Magic Patterns (Application and Chrome extension)
Figma AI Beta
If used with intention, purpose and sufficient preparation AI tools can help you in a number of ways. They can help you to prepare for interviews. Test designs early, find patterns in feedback, and create cool visuals. Ultimately, having this help at hand can speed up your creative process.
For the past six years, Sprint Innovations has focused on giving our clients a path to the top of their respective industries. Our methodology involves a lot of out of the box thinking, as well as research to best understand the environment that each of our partners operate in.
All of that effort is bearing fruit for our team, because we’ve been named as a top software development company in the UK by Clutch.
Clutch is an online reviews platform that collates reviews from companies all over the world. They use a unique verification process that ensures they only get correct information and then leverage that data to determine the top performing companies in every industry, and according to Clutch, Sprint Innovations is one of those top performers.
This award is the result of a lot of what Sprint Innovations as a team has strived to achieve since the beginning. It’s exactly what our Director, Chris, had in mind when we first got the news.
“From day one Sprint has been about delivering the maximum possible value for our clients while maintaining the highest standards. We couldn’t be more thrilled for that dedication to have resulted in being named one of Britain’s top software development firms! I’d like to thank our clients for trusting their business critical operations to Sprint and sharing their experience of working with us.” – Chris Wilson, Director at Sprint Innovations.
Innovation is and always will be the key to success in an ever changing business environment. If you want a partner that not only understands this, but lives it on a daily basis, then we’re the team for you. Give us a call or connect with us on social media so we can get started on your project.
Last year we saw unprecedented amounts of people working remotely for the first time, and it looks like that’s coming with us into 2021. For that reason, we spoke to our clients to see how technology has aided them in this shift to a different type of working.
We built Everglades for Heron Financial, a UK mortgage broker, before the pandemic began, with the goal of automating as many time consuming processes as possible for Heron and to ensure that all of their teams, plus their clients, could collaborate and work together on the same platform, cutting out the need for multiple programs and needless email chains.
Matt Coulson, Director of Heron Financial, had this to say:
"During an unprecedented year with so much more remote working, Everglades has been a vital part of our business for many reasons. The ability to communicate quickly and effectively with colleagues and clients, as well as safely share information and documents has been so important for us. Because the software is totally designed around our needs, everything about it is intuitive and efficient - it’s no exaggeration to say that we can’t operate without it! "
We started developing The Depositary, a SaaS platform, back in 2016 with the goal of transforming the way agents, landlords and tenants interact during the end of tenancy process.
Mission Commander at The Depositary, Kristjan Byfield, gave us some insight into the creation of The Depositary, as well as the platform’s role in keeping agents operating throughout 2020:
"When we first started to form The Depositary and look at its infrastructure, we made a decision early on (back in 2015/6) to build the business around a remote-working infrastructure model. I have never been an advocate of flashy and expensive Head Offices especially in startups- whilst some form of 'hub' might be nice, a single large commercial space just never made sense to me. What is more, as a nationwide offering, it made sense that we would (and should) one day have staff dispersed across the UK or globally. Instead, in our original business model, we allocated a co-working allowance per team member. Interestingly, this approach (at that time) caused complicated negotiations with our strategic partners at the time who found it very hard to understand a business with no 'HQ'.
Another foundation we were passionate about was to practice what we preached: where a human adds no value to a process- automate it! As such, throughout our development, we have always looked at ways to automate our internal operations (through our own bespoke dev as well as utilising integrated solutions).
Whilst face-to-face selling and demos is 'nice' it's inefficient- our intention was to always, where possible, demonstrate, set-up and train online. Again, this approach/intention was heavily questioned by partners in our early stages. Going forwards we would like to retain a blend of the two but expect 80-90% to be conducted online for the foreseeable future.
Fast forward to 2020 and what we had actually built was a company perfectly structured for the 'new normal' of pandemic life! This was a huge validation of what we had aspired to create from the offset but the events of 2020 have also forced people (and by that I fundamentally mean clients) to adopt to this new way of business. One of our fears early doors was how well would agents adapt to online demos? Would they have the set up (cameras, screens, speakers, etc.) in place to accommodate the way we intended to work. The events of 2020 have forced that evolution and the use of tech in this way has advanced 5-10 years (from a consumer adoption perspective) in the last 12 months.
The Team at Sprint Innovations embraced this from day one and has played a key role in helping us develop a company and platform that works in this way."
Overall, it’s clear that software has played a key role in allowing businesses to continue running throughout 2020 and into 2021. The more intuitive the software, the easier transitions to remote working become.
As it looks like we’ll be continuing the ‘new normal’ of remote work for the foreseeable future, we recommend assessing your current technology setup as a business, and reaching out to experts if you feel there is any room for improvement.
Gone are the days when customers accepted that ‘phone lines are now closed', or a response to their query will take ‘2-3 working days’. The customers of today demand always-on service. It’s an expectation that failing to meet drives customers to more tech-savvy competitors.
According to Microsoft, 96% of consumers say customer service is an important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand. Yet according to Salesforce, only 34% of companies are implementing “customer journey mapping” into their customer service.
Becoming an always-on business doesn’t require the expense and complexities of hiring people around the clock to answer the phone. Instead, it’s automation, AI and self service solutions that fill the customer service gaps. Implementing these not only gives customers the always-on service they expect, but also transforms businesses into super-scalable, more profitable growth machines.
Business owners of today should be asking themselves if their business is really ‘always-on’. Can their customers get answers to their queries instantly, or serve themselves out-of-hours? Could a chatbot or self-service portal reduce the burden on their teams?
If you would like to understand how your business can make the transition to always-on, feel free to get in touch for a chat.
