The majority of designers (89%) already use AI to improve their design process, according to the 2025 State of AI in Design report. While most designers use AI tools for exploration and creation, only a quarter of designers (25.7%) leverage AI to generate UI components.
Is adoption simply taking its time, and should we expect that figure to double or triple soon? Or will UI/UX design remain a primarily human-driven affair?
To answer all of these questions, we decided to test several text-to-UI design AI tools and see what works and what doesn’t. Here are our findings.
TL;DR
Text-to-UI generators work great when you provide detailed instructions and need to iterate through ideas fast.
Text-to-UI tools struggle to generate unconventional UI layouts and components, align with contextual requirements, and maintain consistency.
Top use cases for text-to-UI generators include visualizing ideas for non-technical stakeholders and rapid wireframing and prototyping.
What Works Great
Text-to-UI tools undoubtedly have their appeal if you want to speed up UI design services. They excel at:
Generating UI prototypes fast. You can get a low- or high-fidelity prototype in under five minutes. This can help you visualize and iterate through ideas during the exploration and ideation phase more quickly.
Following precise instructions. AI tools don’t handle vague instructions all that well. But if you specify what components should be present on a screen, you can generate custom UI components and even their front-end code in no time.
Creating first drafts. AI-generated UI layouts can be a great starting point for iteration, although they typically need refining before being presented to the product owner.
What Doesn’t Work: Text-to-UI Limitations
Let’s be clear: text-to-UI AI tools aren’t a viable substitute for human designers. These three limitations are a perfect example of why that’s the case.
Somewhat Generic Output
As text-to-UI design tools were trained on vast amounts of examples, they tend to identify the common denominator that matches the prompt and base the output on that. As a result, the generated UI layouts and components have that same template-like look that’s everywhere online these days.
Limited Context Awareness
Most text-to-UI generators struggle to understand the wider context for the design, whether it concerns the brand identity or consistency with existing digital products. They also can’t tailor their output to the non-technical requirements beyond color or font, such as the target audience, market, or competitors’ solutions.
For example, when working on HYCM’s mobile investment app design, we had to review the existing customer portal and translate its structure and user flows into a mobile-friendly design. That required human involvement; AI tools, no matter how sophisticated, would struggle to generate new designs based on existing products.
Inconsistencies & Design System Compliance
We were surprised to see Stitch, formerly known as Galileo AI, ignore some of the instructions explicitly stated in the prompt, like the color or spacing. What’s more, none of the tools we tried could be integrated with a design system like Material Design. That means you’ll probably have to spell out its specific requirements in the prompt manually, which can be time-consuming.
Our Experience with Text-to-UI Generators
When to Use Text-to-UI Tools
Based on our experience with text-to-UI design tools, we’d say they can be extremely handy in some contexts but a productivity drain in others. So, we’d advise you to turn to them only if:
You’re a product owner and you want to brainstorm what your solution could look like before seeking UI design or MVP development services
You already have a rough idea of the product’s look and you want to visualize it before hiring POC services
You want to generate as many ideas as possible for brainstorming and exploration
You want to speed up wireframing and prototyping
At the same time, we’re not at the point where text-to-UI tools can generate product-ready layouts. They also struggle with highly custom or fine-grained designs and complex, interactive user flows.
In Closing
AI may power advances in UI design like adaptive interfaces, real-time personalization, and text-to-speech UI, but it can’t replace UI/UX designers altogether. That said, you can benefit from adding text-to-UI generators to your toolkit, especially in brainstorming, exploration, and wireframing and prototyping stages.
Need to speed up UI/UX design for your project? Discuss it with us to learn how we can leverage AI tools to cut project time and costs.
Sep 9, 2025
By
Fivecube Team
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