Jean Matthee, Design Sales Lead, Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21.
While AI is a valuable tool to help speed up time to market, intentional design, decision quality, innovation, and creativity of expert human UI and UX designers remain crucial for impactful software.
This is according to the designers at Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21, a leading African design and engineering software consultancy.
Jean Matthee, Design Sales Lead, and Marie Pretorius, Lead Designer at Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21, say AI has changed the software design game, accelerating the time it takes designers and developers to create interfaces. However, speed without intent creates complexity disguised as progress, they warn. The future of UX is not faster delivery, but better decision-making.
Pretorius says: “When everything can be built faster, what truly differentiates strong products is not how quickly they are produced - but how thoughtfully they are designed. Intentional design is about ensuring progress is meaningful, scalable, and sustainable.”
She notes: “In a world where we can generate more than ever before, the real skill is knowing what to keep, what to refine, and what to question. That is where good design becomes great design and intentionality becomes the real competitive advantage.”
Putting design at the top of the pyramid
Matthee says: “Historically, business saw design as a ‘nice to have’, lots of time was spent on getting the UI right and then UX followed. If we imagine a pyramid with UI at the bottom and strategic input at the top, AI today accelerates the bottom layer and really frees up our design to get more strategically involved at the top, where they spend time solving the problem, not spending hours making sure the UI is perfect.”
At Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21, intent is at the heart of design, with designers involved in the process from the outset to understand the business challenges, processes, and strategy, and ensure the software decreases the time to value.
Marie Pretorius, Lead Designer, Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21.
The teams don’t just deliver design or development outputs, they also bring extensive expertise that helps guide better decisions. They challenge unnecessary complexity, encourage system thinking over isolated solutions, ensure scalability is considered early, align design decisions with business outcomes, and help teams avoid short-term thinking that creates long-term cost.
Many in-house design teams may lean on AI to produce applications and features, but Pretorius notes: “AI can only do so much, and its outputs are based on what is out there already. You still need someone with the experience of a UX designer who understands the user and the business, to deliver an innovative, intentional solution - not just another generic product. If an organisation wants to innovate, it needs to try something new and creative, while also ensuring the components will scale, and be reusable.”
Matthee adds: “Datasets by their very nature are backward looking, whereas creativity is forward looking. Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21 uses AI as an important tool to help process and serve the right information at the right time, freeing designers to innovate and be creative.”
Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21 is also enhancing speed to market with product libraries and by working to productise some of its models - such as a UX audit. He explains: “In our UX audit, we use a number of theoretical models, augmented by our extensive experience, to identify where improvements can be made. For example, we may see that an emergency assist button is too small for someone to use while in a state of panic or shock. By auditing the precise circumstances under which users interact with the software, we can design and make recommendations of true intent. We bring that same critical eye to other journeys where users must make a purchase or supply sensitive information. Through the audit, we ensure nothing is distracting, untrustworthy, or out of place in the knowledge that such minor flaws can easily lead to the wrong outcome."
Retro Rabbit / SmarTek21’s acceleration tools minimise turnaround time, while ensuring consistency and scalability. And because the company is a consultancy with broad industry experience and the freedom to explore frontier AI models, it can de-risk innovation for highly regulated clients who are restricted from experimenting with emerging AI tools.
Matthee says: “We understand how to de-risk AI and localise the LLMs so they are both relevant to the local context and compliant within their regulated environments.”
Good design is no longer about making things - it’s about making the right things, they emphasise.
