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PM here for Make Designs.

> If it doesn't work with MY design system (as opposed to curated design systems like MUI or Bootstrap or whatever) then it's useless

You hit the nail on the head. This our #1 focus for this team moving forward. If you noticed in the keynote, Dylan highlighted Chen Chen and the Google Material team, both of whom created generators for their design systems. They work, but they were hard to make as the tooling to create these isn't polished or ready yet. It's something we're actively thinking about and improving in order to make this useful for those with existing design systems.

The problem here isn’t that it uses your pattern library or not. The issue is it will spit out static designs that look right but aren’t actually based on either user goals or business goals of the product. It’s just a design that looks right. It’s missing the entire workflow design part and in fact covers over the need for it.

I see it leading a lot of less experienced product programs astray.

So … how most companies are already designing experiences?

Touché

I think what would also be important is to select an existing frame and create additional views that fit the existing frame, that would definitely help creating a proper workflow

Are you really shooting to generate something full-fidelity? Or rather provide lower fidelity but empower the user to spitball and maybe test light interaction?

And if it is full fidelity, how do you ensure users actually own the copyright at the end of the day?

I do think the number one points I've had with the feature were: - I'd like to create tablet sized apps, or desktop/web sized apps (and not landing pages) - It would be awesome if I could provide mock JSON data and let Figma design a rough concept of how to align that data

I think with those two things, It can be a really great "first draft", to be remade by me properly.

> The AI-powered search features seem really promising, as finding the right design file is a problem I face every day. What they showed was the ability to paste a screenshot (e.g. from production) and have it find where that design came from, or use a text search to do the same. That's something that'll make me squeal with joy if it actually works.

I've found that, generally, "better search" is the biggest productivity bump I get from gen AI at the moment. That is, lots of times I don't know the keyword of what I want to find beforehand, and with things like ChatGPT I can just describe it to find out. E.g. recently I needed to update all the values in a Postgres array column of one value to another, so I just described to ChatGPT what I wanted to do. It would have taken me a lot longer to hunt through the docs to find the `array_replace` function and get usage examples.

Plus, in the "better search" use case I'm much less concerned about hallucinations as I'm really only using ChatGPT to get me started in the right direction in the first place.

It’s true. My best example of this recently was describing what I needed to finish a cabling project and discovering that it’s called a “grommet”. I had already spent a bunch of time on the Home Depot website searching for the wrong things (faceplate, outlet cover, etc) without success. Armed with the correct term, I found the product in seconds.

most projects are pretty generic. I've been on countless where they just want something that looks like everything else. If this can deliver that and I can do it without having to contract out a designer, it's a win.

The race is on. What will AI deliver first...? Production-ready code so PMs don't need engineers, or production-ready designs so PMs don't need designers?

The reality is that without domain experts (design, research, engineering, business, law) you're left trusting the AI to make the decision without a good way to check if it made the right one.

Oh you'll find out alright... when it's too late. I'm just waiting for a year or two from now when companies realize what a colossal hole they dug themselves in using a bunch of AI generated crap in production.

We're already seeing it with marketing copy.

Design is different. It's become literally just whatever the boss likes.

You can tell me about the math, theories and laws but look around you, nobody cares about those any more.

> You can tell me about the math, theories and laws but look around you, nobody cares about those any more.

It's true. Just a few years back, design thinking was all the rage. Nowadays, even apps from flagship companies feel all over the place. Attention to detail, unobtrusive interface, intelligent symbols, subdued color palettes, rich illustrations, all that is out the window now. Why should we need good design when we can replace it with cheaper "AI" templates?

When UX designers started to look at their job more like science than art, the tech world became more boring, dull, and soulless.

When did that happen? It's gone from science to pure aesthetics. I wouldn't label it "art", it's merely vibes based.

Read design books from the 1980s versus today. They aren't the same planet.

v0 by Vercel only outputs one UI library, shadcn/ui. Useful if you are wanting to use that library for example starting a project from scratch. Potentially vercel will add more.

https://v0.dev/

You can also output HTML / Tailwind, but the ambition is to support custom React component libraries & design systems.

I'm not a designer and I don't have a design system, but if this lets me build wireframes that I can hand off, that would save me a ton of time.