Enhancing AI Performance in UI/UX and Coding: Insights from a Global User Survey
As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, understanding how different AI models perform across various creative and technical tasks is essential for developers and designers alike. Recently, I conducted a comprehensive survey involving over 6,000 participants worldwide to evaluate the capabilities of several prominent AI models in UI/UX design and coding. The findings offer valuable insights into current AI strengths and areas needing improvement.
Introducing a Crowdsourced Benchmark for AI Performance
Over the past few months, I developed a crowd-source benchmarking platform—DesignArena—to facilitate one-shot generation and comparison of websites, games, 3D models, and data visualizations across multiple AI models. This platform allows users to generate designs quickly and rate their effectiveness, enabling a community-driven assessment of AI capabilities.
With nearly 4,000 votes from around 5,000 active users, the platform has gathered rich data on AI performance. Here are the key takeaways from this extensive survey:
Top Performers in UI/UX and Coding
Leading the leaderboard are OpenAI’s Claude series and DeepSeek models. Among them, Claude Opus received the highest user preference, especially for its strengths in implementing interfaces. DeepSeek’s models, notably v0, excelled in website development, though they tend to operate with slower response times. Interestingly, Grok emerged as a dark horse—surprisingly effective despite less visibility in mainstream discussions.
Noteworthy Models and Their Peculiarities
Grok 3 deserves special mention as an underrated yet highly capable model. Despite limited online buzz—possibly influenced by Elon Musk’s controversial public persona—it ranks within the top five and offers significantly faster response times compared to many peers, making it an attractive option for rapid development.
The Gemini 2.5-Pro model shows mixed results. While some users find its UI/UX outputs impressive, others report instances of poorly designed applications. Although it demonstrates proficiency in coding business logic, its overall consistency in design remains variable.
Compared to the competition, OpenAI’s GPT models are solid but tend to perform just average in UI/UX and coding tasks. Conversely, Meta’s Llama models lag considerably behind other leading players, which aligns with recent aggressive recruitment efforts from Facebook’s parent company to attract AI talent.
Overall Reflections on Current AI Capabilities
Despite impressive advances, AI models still fall short of perfect one-shot or multi-shot generation. They commonly make
