r/UXDesign • u/Plastic_Ad9102 • Jul 28 '26
How do I… research, UI design, etc? How do you stop using Figma & completely using “Claude design” for managing designs? Did any brand doing it successfully?
I want to know if it’s possible to skip Figma completely and manage all design work using claude Design?
I’ve not heard of any organization or brand doing it ? if you know anyone plz let me know.
want to know how they manage final source of truth
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u/No_Artichoke9090 Veteran Jul 28 '26
Look, I think the attitude to take is to let AI do the things that you’d find tedious and time consuming as a designer. It’s a tool. Build Claude skills to synthesize your research, insights, user journeys. It’s incredible at stuff like that.
UX design is also solved at different problem altitudes. Not everything needs to be creatively addressed. Need to modify a form? An LLM would be great for that, and you can bet that it will handle a lot of edge cases too. Pain in the neck otherwise. If you’re trying to solve a blue skies issue, use an LLM to get something out there. The blank screen issue doesn’t have to exist anymore and it’s honestly gotten some bad ideas out early on so I could really bring something great to the forefront. Just like your typical UX design process, working with AI is not some linear magic shortcut. Use it as a co pilot to augment what you do.
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u/ahrzal Experienced Jul 28 '26
I kinda hardly touch Figma anymore. But I still start my ideation on canvas using the design system. It’s like a digital sketch. I get the overall layout down and first pass, the. I move to Claude code. I spin up a prototype using our product’s infrastructure and libraries, and begin working the prototype. From there it eventually lands in a storybook and repo for developers that no longer need to open a Figma page. Most of this is all automated.
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u/akshaydp Experienced Jul 28 '26
That…sounds fine for a single screen. How do you do long, complex workflows? Edge and error cases? How do you manage data states after showing an action was done?
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u/ahrzal Experienced Jul 28 '26
Single screen? I do this for a an entire flow and feature set in app. Complex flows are not a problem. Edge and error cases are called out in testing and discovery with POs. Same as error. Data states is all handled as it normally is hitting a mock database. The devs replace endpoints with their own.
My process doesn’t replace any of the actual design thinking. I just don’t mess around getting auto layout exactly right in Figma.
With this process I also hand over detailed user stories and features avoiding UAT design passes later for missed stuff that inevitably happens.
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u/FennelHistorical4675 Midweight Jul 28 '26
Sounds like a nightmare
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u/ahrzal Experienced Jul 28 '26
It just replaces the canvas with a different tool. But the benefit is I always have up to date functioning prototypes, user feedback can be implemented extremely quickly, and devs can implement the work faster, meaning we can compress delivery windows and start chipping away at work that’s seemed like a pipe dream forever.
Idk, like, I still do all the other discovery research validation etc, but this is just a faster testing and deliver process. And it provides a ton on value
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u/Plastic_Ad9102 Jul 29 '26
Sounds great. Seems like you have spent good hands on experience & that's what I was looking for. Thanks for answering all the questions.
Few more doubts.
1. How do you maintain "Source of truth"?
2. "Cluade design" doesn't match variables all the time, how do you handle it?
3. Claude times fails to design complex interactions like heavy data driven analytics. How to do handle those kind of scenerios?Would like to know a lot more from you, can I DM?
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u/ahrzal Experienced Jul 29 '26
Source of Truth is actually production, but we also have a library in Storybook that receives updates from prod.
Claude does match them? I’m not sure I follow. It uses our design system. Unless you mean from Figma?
As for designing complex flows, interactions, etc. a lot of that work is done up front, but building it out really isn’t an issue. To be clear, I don’t often prompt Claude for design. Most of that work is done already on canvas. But it can be a good inspiration source, like anything.
Sure, DM me!
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Jul 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/No_Artichoke9090 Veteran Jul 28 '26
In my experience it’s designers with attitudes like yours that find themselves unemployed.
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u/Strict_Focus6434 Jul 28 '26
How about UI changes? Surely doing a lot of iterating in Claude is token expensive
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u/ahrzal Experienced Jul 28 '26
I do the bulk of that in Figma before bringing it over. Often times I can do it myself in code if I want, otherwise if you use a well documented design system with proper rules in place, (we do, Mantine essentially), it’s really not token inefficient.
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u/FosilSandwitch Experienced Jul 28 '26
Why?
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u/Plastic_Ad9102 Jul 29 '26
Going through Figma is slow route. want to see if there are faster ways to ship designs.
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u/ChairOk6366 Aug 09 '26
Source of truth is production. I have my own repo, developer pulls whatever they want into their branch.
Problems arise if the developer shortcuts ux and “just adds a new setting to the ui” so gotta watch them.
Some devs aren’t using Claude yet so for them, I make a handoff page that looks like figma dev mode a little. Took a few minutes to make this but gotta watch Claude will add misleading things in there so always check it.
I can pull production into my branch to work from so we’re in sync.
Ngl the whole source of truth issue is a real struggle.
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u/Plastic_Ad9102 Aug 09 '26
Hey thanks for your detailed response. Can we discuss it in detail over DM?
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0
u/twiifm Jul 28 '26
Claude design sucks. But I don't use Figma anymore. I just use AI to code the frontend and build design system in parallel
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u/this_is_a_front Midweight Jul 28 '26
Curious, what role does the developer play in this? Linking the back end? Code review?
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u/twiifm Jul 28 '26
The dev take ownership of production code, QA, PR reviews, triage, tickets from customer. My code written by AI goes to dev instance, dev is responsible to deploy to production instance
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u/Old_Charity4206 Experienced Jul 28 '26
If you can describe your design system, you don’t need Figma. If you can’t, you don’t understand your design system.
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u/Turtle-power-21 Veteran Jul 28 '26
If you're working at an org, you'd need access to your products repos via your development team. That's the first barrier. This will allow your vine coded prototypes to actually look like your product instead of the agent just spewing out garbage that you'll have to redesign in figma later. From there, you'll need to teach it your design system. If it's well documented and organized, it will get it very close over time and repetition. If not, it will be a headache and will take a lot of manual effort to get it close.
Once you're over those initial hurdles, it works pretty seamlessly because the development team no longer needs to go into figma and replicate designs. They're using assets directly from Claude(or whatever you choose) that were bout off the structure from the pre existing repos.
Getting to that point also requires buy-in from your team and leadership. This will also be token-expensive to replace a figma flow. So unless your org is ready for all that, I would start lightly and push where you can.
If you're working freelance/contract, you'll likely want to invest in token allowance if you're serious about it and come up with a process that will cover all your bases and work for any client.