In the age of AI, I’m curious to know how people are designing apps, especially if they’re solo founders or small teams. Are there tools out there that can help design app workflows from end to end? What does the process look like for solopreneurs who are juggling both development and design?
Specifically, with frameworks like TailwindUI, TailwindCSS, and ShadCN being mature and widely available, why does designing quickly and efficiently still feel like a challenge? Is there a gap between the tooling available and the ability to build great UX fast?
Also, how do people handle UX variants when designing and iterating on their apps? Do tools exist that simplify managing and testing different versions of the UI?
Would love to hear about how people are approaching app design, especially in small or one-person teams, and whether there are tools or processes that bridge this gap effectively.
But I hail from the underground catacombs of system administration. Creaky venerable lovable command line tools. Heck, even "traditional" engineering (my degree was in EE, and my first love was physics). Design is both not my strong suit, and also something I have strange opinions about (I'd probably be classed as a "power user" for just about every program I regularly pay conscious attention to). I'm doing this mostly to finally become the 'true' full-stack engineer I've dreamed of being since I was a kid, who understands what's happening to some level from the electron.
All that to say: I really suck at it, and AI puts me on the lower end of mediocre. Progress!
f I was living in my own hermetically sealed chamber, everything I make would look and feel like https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finstem , but I'm not. And that's a good thing! I'm a cantankerous dude at times, it's great that even I can get pulled out of my shell to mess around with like, AJAX and modal dialogs and such.