Less wireframing, more prototyping.
—Leisa
This is a really thoughtful piece by Rich, who’s got conflicted feelings about large language models in the design process. I suspect a lot of people can relate to this.
What I do know is that I find LLMs useful on occasion, but every time I use one I die a little inside.
We noticed a trend: students who pick a UI framework like Bootstrap or Material UI get off the ground quickly and make rapid progress in the first few days. But as time goes on, they get bogged down. The daylight grows between what they need, and what the component library provides. And they wind up spending so much time trying to bend the components into the right shape.
I remember one student spent a whole afternoon trying to modify the masthead from a CSS framework to support their navigation. In the end, they decided to scrap the third-party component, and they built an alternative themselves in 10 minutes.
This tracks with my experience. These kinds of frameworks don’t save time; they defer it.
The one situation where that works well, as Josh also points out, is prototyping.
If the goal is to quickly get something up and running, and you don’t need the UI to be 100% professional, I do think it can be a bit of a time-saver to quickly drop in a bunch of third-party components.
How design fiction was co-opted. A piece by Tim Maughan with soundbites from Julian Bleecker, Anab Jain, and Scott Smith.
A well-written (and beautifully designed) article on the nature of the web, and what that means for those of us who build upon it. Matthias builds on the idea of material honestly and concludes that designing through prototypes—rather than making pictures of websites—results in a truer product.
A prototyping mindset means cultivating transparency and showing your work early to your team, to users – and to clients as well, which can spark excited conversations. A prototyping mindset also means valuing learning over fast results. And it means involving everyone from the beginning and closely working together as a team to dissolve the separation of linear workflows.
Very clever stuff here from Jon in the tradition of Bret Victor—alter Sketch files by directly manipulating code (React, in this case).
I’m not sure the particular use-case outlined here is going to apply much outside of AirBnB (just because the direction of code-to-Sketch feels inverted from most processes) but the underlying idea of treating visual design assets and code as two manifestations of the same process …that’s very powerful.
A presentation at An Event Apart Seattle 2019.