Is Your Website SLOW? Medhat Dawoud Shows You How to Speed It Up
Want a faster, more accessible website? Catch Medhat Dawoud at Infobip Shift 2025 for the scoop on web performance and “speculation rules.”
AI in Design Is Broken – Vitaly Friedman Will Show You How to Fix It
Vitaly Friedman shares his no-nonsense take on AI in design - what actually works, what fails, and how to build smarter user experiences in 2025.
Vitaly Friedman, Co-founder and Creative Lead at Smashing Magazine, writes, edits, and curates everything Smashing – from the books to the conferences. This September, he brings his insight to Infobip Shift Zadar 2025.
He plans to explore AI’s real impact on design. For the past two years, Vitaly has worked to understand what AI means to him personally, especially as a designer focused on building meaningful experiences.
He thinks like a designer, someone who puts users first. When users gain value, businesses gain too. But he refuses to create AI-powered products or features that frustrate users, break experiences, or waste business resources.
In our chat, Vitaly explained how he approaches AI and previewed what his talk will uncover.
‘We can’t just add AI and expect miracles’
Vitaly believes designers and developers often fall into the same trap with AI: they overpromise and underdeliver.
Many people think they just need to plug in an AI model for pattern recognition, language generation, image creation, and they’ve done their job. But that mindset usually leads to user frustration.
He refers to research that shows how much faster people interact with buttons than with open-text inputs.
That makes sense. Typing takes time, and most people struggle to express exactly what they want. So no, we can’t just add AI and expect miracles.
This is where AI actually works
During his talk, Vitaly will showcase real examples, design patterns, and practical techniques from working products. He won’t talk about simple AI tools for image generation. Instead, he’ll focus on serious business and enterprise environments where AI truly improves the user experience.
I’ll also show where AI fails – where it adds complexity, reduces reliability, and makes everything feel less predictable.
Vitaly wants to take an honest, grounded look at what works and what doesn’t, at least for now. As he puts it, “What works in 2025 might already feel outdated by 2027.”
If you care about building smarter products with real value, don’t miss this talk. See you in Zadar, September 14–16.
