Designing with Feeling: The Future of UX Needs Emotionally Intelligent AI

By Brady Starr, Co-Founder of Brady UX

Designing with emotion in mind — the future of UX isn't just functional, it's deeply human.

People lie. People change. People say one thing in a user interview and do the exact opposite once the product is live. If you've worked in UX long enough, you know this. You've felt it. You've explained design decisions with frameworks and heuristics, while quietly relying on your own creative intuition. UX, for better or worse, has always been part science, part gut instinct.

But what if we could go deeper? What if, instead of guessing what people feel, we could know?

The future of UX isn't just data-driven or user-centered. It's emotion-aware. And to get there, we need to go beyond A/B tests, heatmaps, and sentiment analysis. We need AI that can be trained not just on patterns of behavior, but on actual emotional responses — from user interviews, facial expressions, tone of voice, and micro-interactions. That's where Brady UX is headed.

The Limitations of Today's Tools

Figma’s AI features are changing how fast we can design. Uizard turns sketches into prototypes in seconds. EyeQuant can predict visual attention. Odaptos even reads users' facial expressions during remote tests to infer emotional states.

But all of these tools operate in silos. Design generation lives separately from emotional insight. Emotion analysis is disconnected from iterative design. Nobody — not yet — is building a system that lets you actually design with emotion as a direct input.

What We're Building

Imagine an AI model trained on real emotional responses from users across thousands of interviews and usability tests. It learns what frustrates a first-time user. What delights a power user. What makes someone abandon an onboarding flow, or stick around just long enough to convert.

This AI doesn’t just summarize findings. It segments users, builds deeply empathetic personas, and becomes a collaborator in the design process. You could ask it:

• "What frustrates people like this persona on mobile checkout flows?"

• "How do new users feel when they land on this dashboard for the first time?"

• "What patterns lead to anxiety or confusion in fintech onboarding?"
  

And instead of giving you analytics, it gives you insight.

How It's Different

Unlike current tools, this AI isn't just a faster design generator. It’s a research-informed co-designer, trained on human reactions, not just interface patterns. It closes the gap between qualitative insight and UI decisions.

It’s not just AI for speed. It’s AI for empathy.

And it could fundamentally change how we build technology — not by replacing UX designers, but by helping us better understand the people we're designing for, faster and more holistically than ever before.

Why It Matters Now

As AI transforms design, we must resist the urge to use it only to optimize for efficiency. The greatest gift AI can give UX is understanding. But that only happens if we feed it the right data — not just what users do, but how they feel when they do it.

We're not building a tool. We're building a shift in how UX happens.

And we need partners. Researchers. Engineers. Funders. Visionaries. If you believe the future of design should be more human, not less — let's build it together.

Reach out at bradyux.com/meet