Empowering Design Agency: How AI is Revolutionizing Early-Stage Prototyping
My team has been diving deep into the AI playground lately. We’re seeing a real shift in our initial design approach — jumping straight into ideation and rapid AI prototyping before Figma, or even pen & paper. It feels like a significant leap forward in how we, as designers, can truly explore the boundaries and take more agency right from the start.
It reminds me of when I was first introduced to Ruby on Rails scaffolding (circa 2007), famously demonstrated by DHH’s “how to build a blog in 15 minutes”. Instantly building a basic CRUD app, actually clicking through real forms that saved to a DB, and getting fast feedback from clients and users.
That rapid iteration was just gold. It fundamentally changed how I viewed early-stage exploration and hammered home the importance of seeing and feeling a concept quickly. That sparked a real curiosity about what could be built fast.
That early RoR experience taught me to explore what’s possible first. Design could then be informed by tangible functionality. Now, these AI “vibe coding” tools are putting that rapid exploration power directly into the hands of more designers, regardless of their coding chops, giving them even greater agency in the creative process.
Tools like Cursor, Replit, v0, Lovable, Polymet, Bolt and more — are democratizing code-based prototyping on a whole new level. This accessibility is fueling a designer’s natural curiosity to play with interactive elements much earlier in the game.
Listening to Ridd’s recent interviews with various design leaders, he draws a similar parallel to the 2013/2014 wave of advanced prototyping tools including Origami and Framer. These tools were game-changers for mobile prototyping, and Ridd highlights a similar window of opportunity with AI now.
“There’s a window open right now for designers who want to roll up their sleeves and figure out how AI can be a catalyst for their career”
What’s truly exciting now with these AI tools is that it’s opening doors for more designers to actually prototype in code, rapidly see what’s achievable, get it in front of customers faster, and then refine the experience in Figma with a much deeper understanding of its potential. This hands-on exploration breeds a stronger sense of ownership and agency.
Imagine being able to quickly test a OneSignal push notification flow and see its real-world impact. Or rapidly mock up a Stripe checkout page to truly grasp the user journey. Or picture being able to connect a form to Supabase and understand how to save and lookup data. Or explore the live capabilities of UI libraries like Tailwind, or visualizing data with Chart.js, or a workflow UI with ReactFlow — AI tools are enabling this direct engagement and really feeding a designer’s curiosity about how things actually work.
This new era of AI-powered design prototyping isn’t just about spitting out visuals; it’s about rapidly validating concepts with real functionality, user flows, and even API integrations. It’s a genuine game-changer for making truly informed design decisions and empowers us, as designers, to have more agency in shaping the product’s core functionality.
Ultimately, this AI-driven prototyping is empowering designers to be more strategic, more informed, and more collaborative much earlier in the product lifecycle. It’s about bringing tangible experiences to the table faster, driven by our inherent agency to explore and our fundamental curiosity to innovate and create better products.
p.s. we’re hiring Product Engineers at OneSignal
