#114 Lessons from a Decade of Innovation at Wix with Miri Lodman
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Hello everyone and welcome back to the future of UX. I'm Patricia Reiners, your host, and in today's episode I'm joined by the incredibly insightful Miri Lothman, a long-time product leader at Wix, where she's been shaping tools for designers and professionals for nearly a decade now.

Mira is going to share her unique perspective on how AI has evolved inside product teams at Wix, from early and almost experimental prototypes to deeply integrated features that are now shaping the future web design. We will dive into her journey working on one of Wix's first AI-powered tools and how the landscape has changed dramatically.

dramatically since then. I mean, this is what we all noticed. We also talk about what it means for designers today, like how AI is transforming creative workflows. And we talk about the shift towards strategic roles and how platforms like Wix Studio are empowering individuals to do more with less, basically.

So if you're a designer or a product thinker or maybe just curious about how AI is reshaping digital creation, this episode is packed with a lot of amazing insights for you. And in case you want to learn more or connect with Miri or want to learn more about Wix,

You will find all the links, all the resources mentioned in the description box below. So make sure to check it out. By the way, this interview and all other interviews that I did so far on the future of UX are also available on YouTube. So in case you prefer to watch the video version, you will find the link in the description box below. So grab your headphones and I would say let's explore what the future of design looks like

through the lens of someone who's been building it from the inside. Welcome Miri, I'm so happy to have you at the future of your act, so welcome first of all. Thank you, hi Patricia, happy to be here. So before we are diving into the topic, please do like a mini intro where you explain the listeners a little bit about your background and what you're doing.

Hi everybody. So I'm Miri, currently a product manager. So after a few years at Intel, most of my career I spent at Wix, working for Wix. I did various roles here at Wix and in the last about six years, I think, I'm focusing on product management.

And in my current position, I'm leading a product management team in Wix Studio. Wix Studio is a website builder, but for professionals and designers and basically all those people who are creating websites for others as their business. And yes, I'm happy to be here. Wonderful. I think super exciting, especially from a design perspective to seeing also how the tools are evolving. So I'm very excited to see

talk with you about the future and AI, and especially because you were at Wix for such a long time. So you went through all the phases. I think that's super interesting to get your perspective on the future and design generally. I know that before AI was a big thing, you already...

prototype, you already worked with AI. And I'm super curious to hear a little bit more about how this looked like back then, like all the prototyping and all the future visioning, basically. So it's a good question, because basically, my first experience as a product manager was on one of the first products on

of that were powered by AI here at Wix. It was almost a decade ago, which is a long time in terms of AI and this technology. So ADI stands for artificial design intelligence. So you can guess that it was powered by AI. We created this website basically for DIY users to simplify the experience of a website creation for them.

So the website was built by AI and users would provide some details about the business that they are owning and some preferences. And then after some kind of quick processing, they would get

pretty personalized website. Working back then on such a product was it felt very innovative. AI, as you can guess, was in a very kind of early stages, very basic and naive comparing to what we have today. So it felt kind of almost as a guerrilla kind of a mode.

We worked on it just by ourselves in a team, thought of kind of the details and maybe how to progress with the machine learning and what is we're going to train. And everything was very initial. We didn't really know what we're doing, but we tried and I think it went pretty well. And nowadays it is very different. We're working on many and various AI power products now.

And the experience is essentially different because Wix has invested a lot during this decade in AI and all the AI tools advanced tremendously. And now we have endless, I think, amounts of AI and Gen AI models and everything is so standardized. Got a really big standard here at Wix and structure and we consume it, all these AI tools as services.

Now, working with AI tools is very quick and frictionless. And what we need to focus on is basically thinking about the problem. For example, just a recent product that we worked on is a visual sitemap. We wanted to provide a full structure of

of pages and sections that are relevant for a specific business type. So we just used AI in order to tell the business type and AI gave us all these pages and sections. Everything was already automatically done in a matter of seconds. And what we needed to focus on is just to develop the mechanism of creating automatically this website with all these pages and sections. But the AI part is quick and very smooth.

So essentially, yes, the experience now is very different and we, and it's not, it's, it is innovative, but it's not where like we have so many models and so many tools we can use. It's not like doing it ourselves in the garage, you know?

I think that's fascinating, especially if you start by prototyping these basically innovation projects where you have things in mind, you like gorilla test them, basically. You fake a lot of things or Wizard of Oz things. And then suddenly technology becomes available and you can use them and actually build the tools that you envisioned in the past. And how is that for you seeing the switch from...

First envisioning all these things and then seeing them in real life or building them in real life. That's pretty fascinating, right? How is that for you?

It is fascinating. I think though in product management, it's the feeling that we have every time we develop a product. It could be with AI, it could be with, I don't know, other technologies. I always laugh about it with my team that we give birth, we kind of nurture our product, we think about it, we sculpt it and then something is out and users, we hope, are happy about it and it feels like our babies.

is boring but it is the feeling every time of releasing a product um yes it's true um yeah yeah for every feature that you work on but i think with ai it's a bit special because it automates

So many things. And especially when it comes to like web design and interface design. I think that's super fascinating. I'm curious, like what is your users? So people who are actually using Wix either do it yourself. So they're building their own websites or maybe even designers who use Wix themselves.

to design websites for their clients, how do they perceive AI and all the new features? Because I know that you have a lot of AI features nowadays. Yes, you're right. So it is interesting how the perception of AI among us, I'm talking mostly about designers and professionals of Wix Studio, but it is interesting how the perception of AI is changing together with the technology.

So I remember, and we just talked about it not too long ago, AI was this tool that did some magic, maybe not too accurate or procedures that you don't control or you don't have a control over. And the designers would consider using if you can.

let's say, expose the saying, the feature is done by AI. So designers will perceive it as for amateurs and not for professionals. Whereas today, I think just a few months past with the big AI explosion, we see that everybody's now using AI. It's a standard and everybody's using it in different tools,

and models for all sorts of aspects of their work. It's like the opposite direction now, the perception of AI. Designers, they are the first ones to understand that they need to use AI or they're using AI tools in order to amplify themselves, to do the tedious work and maybe to focus, help with AI tools to focus on the strategy and the creative process.

part, for example. So we see that and we understand that in Wix Studio and we see it in all other design platforms, AI is going to the front.

Because now people are willing and want to use these tools. They understand that they're going to help them rather than decrease their self-expression. I totally agree. I'm a huge AI advocate. I think it's a game changer, especially for designers. It opens up so many opportunities, removes all the tedious tasks. So I am a huge fan. And I think it's super important to also implement AI into the tools that we are using on a daily basis.

But one thing I'm super curious about, because I'm having the same discussions with my clients, is how do you define what are the right AI features? Because that's not super easy. Of course, you can, I don't know, write some copy or so. But how does the process at Wix look like to find a great AI use case for Wix Studio, for example? Yeah.

Yes, that's a great question. And I think it goes back all the time to the pure product management as we try to do it here at Wix. We always try to think first of the problem. So what is the problem that we want to solve for our users?

And we have all sorts of problems and some problems are hard or harder than others. So for instance, a problem like how can we help a designer to create a beautiful design for the mobile version that would be also responsive. So the designer designed the desktop, he did the creative part, but now it's like the tedious kind of mobile part. So first question is what is beautiful?

Yeah, so before we tried to solve these kind of problems, which is a hard problem with, let's say, rules and heuristics and to do some kind of something for the user. And the results weren't that good. Now with AI, we understand that we have a technology, a good technology that would probably be able to solve such a problem in a good manner.

So now we understand we have a fit. So we have a problem. We wanted to solve it. And it's a crucial one. It's a big one. We're trying to solve it all the time with different tools. But now we have a suitable tool for it, the AI. So basically, we always go in this direction. What is the problem?

And what are the tools that we have? Sometimes, now in many cases, we would use AI because yes, AI got to a point where it can solve such crazy problems and at scale. But sometimes we wouldn't select AI, obviously. Sometimes we would do it in a traditional way with other tools and technologies. Yeah, that makes total sense. Start with the problem first. Unfortunately, what I'm currently seeing is that a lot of products...

I think they're just like, I don't know, putting AI on it to use it in marketing. But in the end, it's not super helpful for users or just designing a chatbot or something. And I think this definitely needs to change that you really think about the problem and then do your user research, understand...

the user, but also the technological topics. What is actually, what is AI actually capable of? What can it automate? How can it help you? Or what you mentioned about make things beautiful, which is very difficult also for like non-designers make a website look good. So it's wonderful if AI can prepare visuals or help you with the organization of the web website and these kinds of things. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah,

When we think about, I think this is a big question that I'm always getting also on social media, some curious to get your take on it.

AI or a lot of designers still think that AI is might replace them at some point, right? Because even if you think about building a website before we studios and there are also some competitor who do maybe something similar, they needed to basically design everything themselves and cold things themselves, hosted somewhere. So like the process was so difficult.

And now things get so easy. At Big Studio, for example, you basically drag and drop things together. Then you host it somewhere and then it's online. So within a couple of hours, you build a website, which gets super easy. And now it gets even easier with AI. So I'm wondering, where do you see a designer being involved in that process? Because I feel like now everyone can basically design websites. You don't need to be a designer anymore. Yeah.

So, yes, that's a big question that also internally we sometimes ask ourselves, not just for designers, for everybody, for developers, as you said, for content writers. So I believe that we as humanity, basically, we go forward and try to build for ourselves tools in order to simplify and spare us from some of the work that we do just in order to progress and be more effective

creative and invent even more helpful products in general. From the beginning of times, that's just what happened. Every time something, a new technology came and helped humanity to progress. I think AI is here would do the same. It would just help every profession to progress to new levels.

So if we're going to code faster and design faster, it basically and better. So we can focus then on doing bigger products or bigger projects or more innovation or more interesting stuff or spare time for, I don't know, our daily things that we want to do. I don't think that it would go. I think maybe a new channel would be open to do other things.

design for this new AI kind of a new realm. So basically, I don't, I believe that people would now focus probably on understanding how they can leverage AI. And then eventually, once it would be our common toolkit as other technologies as as web as iPhones and smartphones, and once it's a common technology, then we go to a new phase.

of our creativity, of our innovation, of our interest. So I think the future is bright in that sense. It's just another like a very crazy powerful tool, but it's that. I love that. I think it's super important to don't really see it as a threat, but more as an opportunity. And as you mentioned earlier,

like bringing things to a new level websites 2.0 things get more complex we had the whole responsive design thing and now things are you moving also beyond like classical websites we have voice integration at some point you know we have other large language models and like websites are also changing this is just the beginning of a big change so i think it makes total sense that

Also, our process needs to speed up somehow and we need to focus on other topics. As you mentioned, also like the strategic part, like talking to the clients, thinking like what is the right content and really getting those things right, which is also a big challenge. Even thinking about what kind of text you actually need, what are the right visuals and then prompting AI to create those visuals. So it's definitely not easy.

It's not easy. And yes, as you say, we have so many parts. You think about website creation is just a designer, but there are so many aspects to it. So first of all, discussing with a client and iterate about how you get the proper design. And then think about the branding if the client doesn't have a branding. And then actually to creating a website, which is just one part. And then giving like the handle of the website, which is a process by itself.

And then maybe doing the marketing. So for example, we have all these kind of tools here at Wix for all these processes. It's not just designing the website. It's not just that. So the AI, you can define and use the AI in all these processes and different AI models and completely different tools.

And then you can decide where you want to focus being in the front, being in the business, maybe be the designer, maybe be the one who is doing the maintenance and always in a relationship with a client and maybe doing the marketing. So you can understand where you want to focus and where you maybe want to work hand in hand with an AI just to spare you the part maybe that you don't want to focus on.

so that's also something that can be there sometimes people are not maybe willing to for example be freelancers just because they have all these work so they can think how they can add jai to the parts they don't really you know like maybe i think that's such a wonderful point right because it

also opens up all the capabilities that you have. Maybe you used to only be able to write an offer for designing a website. Now you can write an offer for designing the website, writing the content with AI, creating the visuals, doing the marketing and maybe hosting it.

like a full package basically just one person so i think that's wonderful especially i'm a freelancer myself so i think those things are especially exciting for me to hear that you're not you don't need a big team to build something but you have ai basically as a partner and your main task is to communicate with the clients

understand what they want maybe workshop format strategy format where you understand where what the client wants use this and then basically create a wonderful offer which is also wonderful for the client i think in the end exactly yeah fascinating i think it's so interesting to see how also design is changing and the perception of design not just like making things pretty we are

happily not we moved away from that but more into the strategic part where you consult a client and basically guide a client from like the early start until the like the finished product without a big team in the background what do you think how does tools like wikistudio for example are going to evolve i don't know if you can share a little bit about the roadmap but i would be so curious to

understand a little bit of the things that are probably going to happen in that space. Okay, I'll share a bit about at least our focuses. We're going to continue and invest a lot in AI that we know for sure. We understand that the technology is accelerating and it can provide us, as I said, the option to solve problems we couldn't solve before.

Basically, hand in hand with developing and keep investing in the technology, we're going to explore how we can now try and solve these problems. We're going to explore how we can help users with the process of creating their design and with the design. We're going to explore how we can, for instance, spare all the tedious work.

So we need to dive into it and understand where is all these tedious tasks and repeated things that we can spare. So we're going to explore that as well. And another thing is we're going to explore how basically along the entire process, as we talked about, not just the

design part but the entire thing of actually end-to-end creating a website or an online presence for someone how we can along this process always provide answers to questions or problems the designer encountered during the process so yes and we're going to explore it with what kind of question would this be technical questions or more like strategic ones

So all of them, basically. It could be technical and strategical. It could be... It's just your partner. The partner just beside you who can maybe help you to understand everything you need to know. It could be like everything. Inspirational question or very detailed technical question or how I should do something or how I...

what I should do, where can I find stuff, or what is the best way, and teach me that and that. Like everything, all sorts of that. That's, I think, the beauty with AI. It can eventually leverage it to know all sorts of levels of questions and knowledge.

So a little bit like Clippy from Microsoft. I don't know if you remember like the paperclip thing. We're not a fan, but I think still it was funny to have Clippy walking on the glass. Sometimes, yes. It's our internal joke. Clippy? No, no.

product and we're still exploring how would it should be maybe less intrusive more of a friend or a partner that works with you more intuitive more human language more knows a lot and not just like a specific thing but we'll see i think like you brought something super important just up which is like the intrusiveness and i think this was a big problem from clippy

This like the user maybe did something wrong and then Clippy was knocking of, hey, do you need help? And this was like super annoying. So I think it's all the interaction with AI is also from a UX perspective, pretty fascinating for me. Like when this AI steps in, when it recognizes that the user struggles, how does the interaction looks like? Is this that the coach or the Clippy 2.0 interacts with the user or not?

Is this more like, "Hey, here's a hint, do this." Or something like that the user still feels in control. Are those topics that you also talk about, like how does interaction work? Because that's very difficult and we don't have a lot of best practices or something that we can use at the moment.

So we, it is, it is how we also think about it here. We're exploring a new world of experiences. The experiences is changing is different than just like if we had before that we had simply an editor and you work with it or a design platform or whatever, it's

And now the experience would be different. What is this exactly? Like what, where's AI? How can it help without being intrusive or still be, but still be present and still feel like it give you value and not just correcting you or so exactly correcting you.

But I think these kind of questions, we always have them when we do a product because the product, if it's AI or not AI, we always think about, is it clear enough, exposed enough, not intrusive, but still visible at the right moment, in the right place. We always think about it in terms of product and experience. So with AI, it's just another question.

level let's say of thinking about it it's not new to us it's just another channel yeah it's still about the user the same human being as we designed for many years basically exactly yeah that's a good reminder i think we shouldn't forget it the technology is changing but the user is still the same i think i saw this somewhere on linkedin and i was like so true it really makes sense yeah still the same values and other psychological things that we learned

are still valid for AI. Exactly. Don't want to be, don't want to annoy the user. It was like 10, 10 years ago. And now. Yeah. You don't annoy it. Yeah. No, that that's, that's true. It's always the same. Um,

What would you say from your perspective, there are a lot of designers currently listening to this podcast episode and wondering like how to prep for the future, what will become important. So from your experience being at Wix for like 10 years, really long time, you have seen a lot of different things from innovation and the real AI projects to like now the real integration of AI. What kind of tips do you have for designers to really stay ahead and keep

have a wonderful career and future in the next decades. So tips, be always in the front, be curious, yeah. Try all these tools and technologies, try to maybe imagine the future a bit and how you do actions now that might be not your forte, but then maybe you'll benefit just because you already tried and used and progressed with. And

And basically, open mind and don't be scared about the technology taking your place. Try it and use it for your benefits. As we just said, just try and understand where you can be more efficient just because you did it and be more creative just because it now gives you the time and the mind space for it.

I guess that's our tips. That's how we see it here. We're trying here at Wix Studio, always think not how we are doing the product of yesterday, but how we're trying to invent the product of tomorrow. Yeah. Be in this position.

And this is, I think you said it wonderfully. It's so important to stay curious and really stay ahead, experiment with the tools and try things out so that you can also make up your own mind about the things that are going on. So less talking, more doing. I think this is super important, right? Because the tools are changing and

even if you don't like how the tools are changing, this is how it is. You need to use it. And then as we talked before, be ahead and think about like how your role can change, like more strategic and all the things that you can offer now as a designer. I think it's such a fascinating time as a designer or else as a product manager, everyone working in tech and product. And I think it's very important to do the right things now.

at the moment to be prepared for what's ahead of us. So if people would like to reach out to you, connect with you, maybe they have a follow-up question. What is the best way to reach you or where can they find you? So Miri Ladman on LinkedIn. Also, they can reach out through Instagram, also Miri Ladman, and also Facebook, whatever tool. Yeah, they prefer whatever platform. Okay. Yeah.

Wonderful. Very exciting also to see how Wix Studio evolves. Yeah, for me, super interesting. I'm like also sometimes sharing insights like what Wix Studio is doing with AI. So I think this is pretty, pretty cool. It was wonderful talking to you, getting like a little sneak peek into AI.

yeah how you guys are working on the future of tools so thank you so much for being so open and sharing that i really enjoyed our conversation so thank you mary thank you very much patricia and i enjoyed it as well thank you wonderful thank you thank you