my design flow

i love experimenting with workflows and am constantly trying to improve the way i prototype with ai. here are my thoughts on the workflow so far.

start with ux fundamentals

solving ui problems with ai from the start typically lands you in trouble. ai is a statistical model; it doesn’t understand all the different aspects of your business the way you do.

• work from hypotheses and assumptions. design is about figuring out terrain that’s hidden from you at first. you explore it by crafting assumptions and creating ui solutions to test them.
• keep a changelog of design variations so you can trace your thinking and work within a system instead of endlessly exploring variations.

what the workflow looks like for me right now

1. understand the problem

who are the users? what are the potential solutions? why do we need to solve this? when do users encounter the issue? what have they already tried to solve this pain point?

gather basic information about the problem space.

2. make your assumptions

ask claude to question you about the problem space to minimize blind spots.

3. create prototypes, not wireframes

prototyping is extremely cheap now. i use paper to explore design variations, with each variation tied to a hypothesis. this gives me version control over my thinking process, so i can branch into other ideas without worrying about forgetting where i came from.

another useful workflow is to have claude create an html file to tweak promising solutions further in code.

for example, on a marketing reporting page i worked on, there was a promising funnel design, but it looked visually uninteresting. i asked claude to create an html configuration page specifically to tweak the funnel’s appearance. it gave me knobs to control the ramp’s roundness, blur, the background color of the area under the curve, and other visual details.

4. share the prototype with the team and gather feedback

i do this by creating a pr for a prototype page within the app. this page has the same ui and states as the production app. the backend is replaced with mock data in the same shape as the production data.

i hand off the design i curated in paper or a claude artifact to my agent. this lets me see the final design in a production environment without the hassle of moving mock data around.

in this prototyping environment, i ask claude to create a menu bar that lets me toggle between different component states. this makes user testing easier and faster because i don’t need to manually change data to see empty, error, success, and other states.

at the end, i share the pr with the team and include a video walking through my thinking. i ask for specific feedback and share the questions i have.