Update 7: An AI-rtistic collaboration

This week, we've been exploring how we can use AI to improve our design workflow.

We've been hugely helped in this endeavour by the fantastic videos produced by Kirk and the team at UI Collective, which we highly recommend. 

While using AI to design digital products is in its relative infancy, things are changing and fast. For example, Google recently launched Stitch, which is a bold vision of a UI design tool built entirely around AI. 

What we've found most relevant to our immediate use case, where we are focused on experimenting with possible solutions to the problems revealed by our ongoing research, is harnessing Claude Code to rapidly iterate ideas and push realised designs to Figma for finalisation and eventual developer handoff. While Figma, like many vendors, is rapidly developing its own set of built-in AI features, we have found that, for now, the combination of Claude and Figma yields better results.  

This approach can be further enhanced through the use of Claude Skills, which allow us to essentially brief Claude with information and design references that it then considers when generating designs. 

Harnessing AI to realise our ideas more efficiently will significantly expedite the product design process, saving us thousands upon thousands of individual clicks and keystrokes and allowing us to maximise the impact of our limited time and energy. 

Further to this, combining an AI-augmented design methodology with AI coding agents, as we have explored in previous posts, will enable us to design and build digital products with an increasing share of the repetitive, heavy-lifting workload handled by AI. Exciting indeed!

We wish you a fantastic weekend.