Deze week ben ik nog eens in België. Ik reis een paar keer per jaar tussen België en Mexico, en mijn primair doel van de laatste twee trips was werkgerelateerd.
Ik ben bezig met de opbouw van Obra Studio en telkens ik in België ben is het goed om klanten in het echt te zien, om af te spreken met nieuwe collega’s en natuurlijk daarnaast toch nog even tijd nemen voor familie en vrienden.
Wij zijn ondertussen met een team van 4 aan de slag aan allerhande projecten. We bereiken bijna de €100 000 verkochte omzet, waar ik blij om ben.
Als eigenaar van een agency heb ik altijd een beetje schrik van “de zomer”. In juli ligt België nogal plat, en dan heb je maar beter je projecten verkocht. Ik ben blij dat dat grotendeels het geval is en we veilig en met voldoende werk de zomer doorkomen.
Vorige week maandag starte een nieuwe collega, en kwamen we samen in een co-working space om te praten over de eerste projecten.
Vandaag heb ik een Figma workshop, waar ik 2 designers les zal geven in Figma. Eén van de uitdagingen is controle nemen over een door een agency aangeleverd design systeem.
Tegelijk leveren wij als agency ook systemen op en is er intern het gesprek gestart wat de exacte kwaliteitsnorm is van zo’n oplevering.
Ik praate met een goeie vriend die als design manager werkt bij een scale-up, en ik deed hem uit de doeken waarom ik zo hou van een agency. Ik hou van de uitdagende opdrachten, van verplicht te worden creatief uit de hoek te komen (zeker als het werk niet automagisch binnenkomt zoals dit jaar!); ik hou van de duidelijkheid van, dat als er een project is, je een afspraak maakt over wat er moet gebeuren en dat uitvoert. Je zit niet te wachten op momentum in een design project, je hoeft het niet te forceren: de noodzaak is er al via het project.
Vanavond nog een verkoopsmeeting in Brussel, en een afspraak met een potentiële business partner.
Mischien is het omdat ik al lang beweeg in agencies, maar ik voel me als een vis in het water.
Ik heb gisteren na 4 maanden eindelijk nog eens de tijd gevonden om een ritje te maken met de fiets. Een vriend had een volgwagen geregeld. Met zijn drieën gingen we op weg naar Teotihuacan (ongeveer 60km van Mexico-Stad).
Het was een fantastische fietsrit en ik was blij om nog eens iets anders te doen dan werken, want het is nogal intens geweest de laatste maanden.
Het is een vreemd jaar voor design. Ik zie een paar zaken in de markt.
Eén feit is dat er op dit moment veel designers aan het werk zijn die eigenlijk maar half weten wat ze doen, wat na enkele maanden werk de facto een negatieve impact geeft op de perceptie van design binnen een bedrijf.
Een bedrijf dat met prutser(s) werkt beslist na een negatieve ervaring dan al eens snel om design door front-enders te laten doen, of niét te doen, met een niet-ontworpen product als gevolg. Zeker als er bespaard moet worden.
Een slechte ervaring met een UX-bedrijf is van alle tijden. We zagen dit patroon met Mono reeds in 2014; er waren meerdere bedrijven die terug overtuigd moesten worden van het nut van design.
Ik denk dat die “slechte ervaring” nu overgegaan is naar het interne. Designers werken in bedrijven maar kunnen niet eeuwig claims blijven maken over het “design systeem verbeteren” als job-bezigheid.
Op een bepaald moment moeten ze een sprong maken naar écht product design en de zaken fundamenteel bekijken (als dat werk al bestaat binnen het bedrijf in kwestie). Er zijn er die dat kunnen, en er zijn er die blijven hangen in hun enige vaardigheid om een scherm te kunnen produceren. Daar zien managers van in dat de meerwaarde beperkt is, zeker als ze het min of meer zelf kunnen.
Er kan momenteel veel met templates (steek er maar rap een shadcn template in!), er kan verder geprompt worden om interface design te laten doen door niet-designers.
Maar ik vraag me af: leidt dat nu echt tot goede resultaten? Als ik de meeste resultaten van vibe coding zie denk ik: dit is verschrikkelijk. Hier is nu eens echt over niks nagedacht. Volgorde van de menu items? Micro-interacties? User flow? Allemaal genegeerd, om een snel prototype online te zetten… sorry, maar dat is geen product design.
Ik ben zelf super geïnteresseerd om de laatste technieken zelf te gebruiken (zoals het een paar dagen geleden uitgekomen Firebase Studio: dit is de nieuwe default voor mij), maar als ik zelf begin te vibe coden ben ik snel 60 iteraties ver om tot iets te komen dat op iets lijkt.
Om daarna de code te nemen en verder te werken in een Cursor; of om het toch terug naar een design app te brengen om er over na te denken. Met andere woorden: het proces stopt niet bij de initiële prompt. Over dit proces schreven we met Obra een hele gids.
Mensen denken doordat ze iets visueels te zien krijgen de perceptie dat je 80% van je werk klaar hebt terwijl het eigenlijk 20 of 30% is. Het is niet omdat je snel een interface kan bijeen prompten, dat die interface ook echt goed en bruikbaar is.
Die interface is niet gevalideerd, het is in feite een eerste ideetje dat je op je scherm hebt gekregen. Het is het equivalent van de eerste 3-4u werk in een designprogramma. Ja, je hebt een visueel artefact: maar dat is nog maar het begin van het werk. Als CXO ben je nu amazed dat je dat gedaan hebt gekregen, omdat je die vaardigheid voorheen niet had. Maar als je wat je nu hebt naar productie moet brengen, is er nog een lange weg te gaan.
Een markt bestaat uit vraag en aanbod, en de vraag is momenteel beperkt.
Ik ben er zeker van dat er een betere periode aankomt na een tijd, maar gegeven enig macro-economisch wereldnieuws in combinatie met een nakende recessie, en de twee bovenstaande factoren (prutsers die de markt verpesten; dat product managers en CXOs zelf een interface in elkaar kunnen knutselen), is er minder werk voor product designers.
Eén van mijn theorieën is dat, als het over de designers met te weinig skills gaat, dat een deel van die mensen de jobmarkt zullen verlaten omdat ze gewoon niet aan de slag kunnen.
Een ander deel zal via mentoring en de juiste motivatie toch doorbreken tot een goed designer profiel. (Ik denk terug aan een apprenticeship – laat iets weten als je het juiste profiel bent!)
Wat betreft het vibe coden van producten en het “niet meer nodig hebben van een dedicated designer”. Voor kleine bedrijven zal er na een paar maanden zal er wel een besef zal groeien dat er misschien enkele fundamenten missen in het designwerk, en het misschien toch eens met enige coherentie aangepakt moet worden.
Als een softwarebedrijf groot genoeg is, hebben ze sowieso toch dedicated designers nodig. En er zal altijd een markt bestaan voor kwaliteit.
Wij hebben als nieuw bureau wel boeiende opdrachten voor startups en SaaS-bedrijven, maar het plan dat ik had van het echt zwaar opschalen naar 5 FTE in 1 jaar lijkt me op dit moment nog wel vrij ambitieus.
Wij werken nu met 4 freelancers aan verschillende opdrachten maar in # uren gaat dit over 2 FTE. Binnenkort gaan we naar een 3 FTE. We groeien traag, maar gestaag.
“An agency is people” en de juiste mensen tegenkomen om het juiste team te vormen blijft een permanente uitdaging. Wij hebben momenteel 1 job uitstaan, maar als mijn verhaal je aanspreekt, los van die specifieke vacature – neem zeker contact op.
Ik ga volgende week nog eens naar Belgie, om de eerste persoon die vast in het team komt werken verwelkomen.
Als ik België ga neem ik altijd de kans om vrienden en familie te zien. Daarnaast neem ik de tijd om koffietjes te drinken met de juiste mensen. Een babbel brengt altijd iets. Als deze post je op 1 of andere manier aanspreekt, laat zeker iets weten.
Ik ben nog altijd bezig met het bouwen van een groter bedrijf en de enige manier om dat te doen is via de juiste projecten, opportuniteiten en contacten. Neem contact op voor een koffie!
Currently, I am about four months in starting up my new agency. I wanted to document a bit of the journey as we move forward.
Starting a company has its ups and downs and is definitely not as stable a job as working for a product company, but most days I couldn’t be any happier with my decision to start an agency again.
Some days the doubts creep in. The most worrying part for me is that it’s particularly difficult this year to get the right clients, as some design processes have been turned on their head by the new AI design capabilities; the market is flooded with designers; and the impending recession isn’t particularly helping either.
I know what kind of projects we are good at: helping with the design role in a software team when a) a piece of software that is already successful is getting a redesign or b) in the phase of company growth where the company needs both the strategic vision of a senior designer, yet it’s not sensible to have a full-time hire. One task for me is to sell myself and my team to that specific kind of client.
When I was working in my previous agency, I literally had no idea how to do sales and business development. Most projects came via referral and overall things mostly flowed naturally. This is not the case this year and I have to do active outreach, keep a list of potential clients, and really get out there. I feel like I’ve picked up some skills in that area over the years. Part of it is a mindset to deliberately work on the company instead of in the company; another aspect is literally how you spend your time. If you are meant to work on business development, don’t be working on side projects or writing blog posts (guilty as charged…).
I also find it quite difficult to hire – what we do at Obra Studio is quite specialized. Even though there are many designers looking for roles, many don’t have the necessary skills to do the particular kind of work that we do. I’ve had a hard time defining what we want in designers. I am looking for sort of a mix between an agency and a product designer. Somebody T-shaped enough to switch roles within projects in the pursuit of shipping great software. Somebody who’s actually interested in user interfaces and didn’t just choose this field “to earn six figures”.
At this moment, we have two more open positions to fill. We are looking for a UI/UX designer with front-end skills. This is a contract role for one year in a part-time capacity. I am also still looking for a business partner to run operations in Belgium and take a joint risk in building the team. The main requirement is proven experience as an agency founder and to be driven to work on building out a boutique agency with a high quality standard.
The most difficult jump I foresee is the jump from 2FTE to 5FTE (full-time equivalent). While we currently work with 3 freelancers, we are only generating 2FTE of work. We need to move to generating work for 5 FTE. The business partner in Belgium is a crucial part in scaling up operations.
All in all, I can’t complain. The two things I was discussing are more or less evergreen problems for agencies: having enough clients, and hiring the right people. In general, things are going steady and we are approaching €75k revenue in a short period.
Currently, we have about 3 clients in what I’ve started to call “Obra Education” (Figma workshops, designing with AI workshops etc.) and another 3 in our main work, the design projects. Four clients are from Belgium, one from Luxembourg and one from the US.
I’ve steadily been working on our Craft CMS-based website with a trusty web developer freelancer. I’ve started to create landing pages for the different types of services we have on the Obra website. The latest one is about the UX rework of Bootstrap-based codebases. I was in a conversation where I was reminded that this was a specialty of my previous agency.
I notice more questions than I expected about Figma workshops; and about designing with AI. What I didn’t expect was no questions whatsoever about accessibility services, even though the European Accessibility Act is basically around the corner.
It’s tempting to sometimes focus on optimizing processes, but for now, given our tiny size (3 freelancers & me) it’s not necessary to optimize things too much. You can forever look at processes, templates and the perfect website. However, the focus should be on growth. I have to remind myself to keep my eyes on the ball.
It’s April 1st but I am already thinking a few months ahead. The summer months are typically low on work, as Belgium tends to fall asleep in July and you basically have out-of-offices talking to each other. I want to secure the right projects to work on to continue our growth trajectory. If you are in the market for an agency, check out our design services.
You can have these dreams about a cool design agency, but in the end, you have to treat it like a business. But if you treat it too much like a business, it becomes something else, something you might not agree with.
This blog post is about purpose, strategy and vision. Three highly conceptual topics. I believe this post might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but linking it to the right persons will help me on my journey.
Purpose
I was asked this question this week in a survey:
What is the purpose of your firm? Please rate with:
0 as a minimum: Maximising shareholder value is the main driving force when making business decisions.
Middle: When making business decisions we carefully balance financial, social and/or environmental objectives including the interests of our stakeholders.
7 as a maximum: Our company is deeply committed to both positive social and/or environmental outcomes. Purpose shapes our core value proposition and is a top priority of the company’s leadership.
When I answered, I put Obra squarely in the middle.
I had lots of thoughts lately about someone who made a statement that an agency is essentially a margin business; someone works for you, and then you take a margin on their wage/a cut on their freelance rate, and that’s it.
This comes with lots of philosophical questions; obviously my agency is providing employment for myself. It is providing employment for others (currently 3 freelancers & growing)
Obviously we have to make profit to exist.
But that’s not all there is to it.
You want to work on projects you ethically agree with.
You want to provide quality work that you are proud of. If my work was a dumpster fire but I got paid handsomely for it, I wouldn’t be happy.
You want to grow as a person & team
You want to build a team; there’s a social aspect to the job.
So within the range of “maximizing shareholder value” and “fully purpose-driven”?
Let’s find a good middle ground. Maybe shift it a bit more to purpose-driven if we have enough stability/money and thus the luxury to do so. Then another question that made me think:
Strategy
To what extent is your company planning the strategy? Please rate with:
0 as a minimum: We have some idea about the strategic direction, though there is no clear strategic plan.
Middle: We have a strategic plan, but we did not carefully generate alternative strategies to determine this plan.
7 as a maximum: We have clearly determined the firm’s long-term strategic plan and generated and evaluated alternative strategies before we determined this plan.
For this one, once again I put Obra straight in the middle.
But to be honest, it should probably have been 1 or 2: “We have some idea about the strategic direction, though there is no clear strategic plan.”
I determined strategy and planning are 2 entirely different activities (thanks to this helpful video); then put my own spin on it.
So these things are separated: a strategy comes from identifying a market opportunity, then checking if your company can do it better, faster or cheaper, by applying tactics. These tactics lead to activities.
Fig 1: Strategy: market opportunities lead to a strategy, lead to tactics, lead to activities
These activities can eventually be planned. So in a way, there is a thing as “strategic planning”, but how you get to it is not by starting with the planning.
So for example, a market opportunity I determined is doing something with the rise of LLMs that can basically generate entire front-ends now. Combining this with earlier vast experience in HTML prototyping and design skills as a team it leads to an opportunity to do something unique (see; slides on LinkedIn).
Such a market opportunity can be mapped on a strategy board. But then the actual activities to get there (make the slide deck, present the deck, determine the workflow, create project templates etc.) are a different process.
Like the referenced videoa above states, too often these things get conflated.
Fig 2: Activities: some you do, some you don’t. We all have limited time to execute on things. What is needed and what is a distraction?
Vision
Another thing I was triggered by this week is this checklist in the intro of the book Traction.
Specifically I was triggered by the first five points in the “Organizational checkup”:
We have a clear vision in writing that has been properly communicated and is shared by everyone in the company.
Our core values are clear, and we are hiring, reviewing, rewarding, and firing around them.
Our Core Focus™ (core business) is clear, and we keep our people, systems and processes aligned and focused on it.
Our 10-Year Target™ (big, long-range business goal) is clear, communicated regularly, and is shared by all.
Our target market (definition of our ideal customer) is clear, and all of our marketing and sales efforts are focused on it.
Figure 3: organizational checkup, from the book Traction (taken from the free Kindle sample)
Do we really have a clear vision, in writing? Currently, we work with 3 freelancers, so it’s not that important to go all vision on them. But as we will progress towards having more business partners, payroll employees, more collaborators etc. this will become increasingly important.
The book Traction was written specifically for a company that’s doing semi-well, 2M revenue with 10 people (in US market), but that’s kind of stuck where they are. The author argues that with their plan they have basically led these kinds of companies on a growth pad to unlock a better business.
I find most business books to be summarizable in a few key sentences. One book that helped me a few months ago was the eMyth – it’s also referenced in this book. Another one I need to look into is profit first.
When it comes to vision, with Mono our goal was to become a reference in UI design in Belgium, building high quality designs to serve our clients.
High quality is very specific; how do you even determine quality? (Dear reader, this question would lead us to far, but I certainly want to give this topic a go later ;))
A reference is in the eye of the beholder: who are you a reference to? Do you seek the respect of peers? What is “recognition” anyway?
Obra Studio is in many ways a continuation of what we did with Mono, but I feel like this time around, I need to work more onthe business instead of in the business.
The core logic of wanting to do quality work stays.
But there are so many new factors around this time, from AI to me living in Mexico to how the UX market is evolving (in weird ways). I guess the challenge is to keep chipping away at the problems, tackle them, and build the business.
If this blog post vibes with you in any way, feel free to e-mail me: johan@obra.studio . I removed the business partner listing from the website but I am still looking to collaborate with the right people to make this happen.
This week I got a chance to try out Subframe. It’s a new design tool that is slightly hard to position within the category of design tools.
Subframe follows the logic of Subform (RIP) where you are not working on a free canvas, but all your designs are “auto layout” by default.
A tool like Framer — that leans towards auto layout all the things — still allows you to draw something freely and then put it in a stack when you like; allowing for sort of a Figma-like freedom when exploring ideas (minus the proper vector tools).
In Subframe you don’t have that “creative freedom”, rather you are constrained to changing layouts by either editing them in a sort of “insert component in an already existing stack”-kind of way or by prompting them with AI.
The benefit of this style of working is that designs are essentially constrained to the “system”, which then allows for an immediate code export. In the spectrum of creativity vs system design, Subframe sits squarely in the system design logic.
In the current version, the base system itself does not seem that manipulatable (relying on a bunch of base ShadCN/Tailwind like components like many AI code generators).
What I would find interesting towards the future is to be able to manipulate the base system in a manner that’s more flexible. In my projects I have a lot of custom needs.
Another thought I have is that if code conversion is immediate, but you then change something in the code, like adding a new component, how do you ever backport it back to the design app?
Within design systems, for years, we’ve been looking for sources of truth.
There is the design tokens logic (often overcomplexified by consultants); there is the problem of syncing design to code; and there is the problem of working at scale. On the corporate level you usually end up with a tome of guidelines (think Shopify, IBM…) that is sometimes helpful and sometimes wildly inflexible.
Would Subframe help solve this problem by having an immediate bridge between design and coding work? The paradigms the founder are working on are at the verg least extremely interesting explorations into this problem statement, and I am looking forward to follow its further development.
This final post continues my blog posts based on the conclusions of my trip to Belgium. This one is about how AI changes the game for designers.
I was in a lot of conversations in the past weeks. One overarching theme was the change to design as a job. The big shift that is happening in software due to AI is also causing a big change in the perception towards UI and UX design.
At the risk of oversimplifying; after the internalization of UX, many people landed in software teams with an overindexed focus on design systems.
It’s always been a bit wrong to “follow the sprint” but many designers are in that kind of job. They are creating and modifying screen designs without being in the strategy seat. They have to fight for any access to users and often don’t even talk to a real person using their design work for weeks or months on end.
Design never got it’s seat at the management table: that seat went to product managers who decided what to do next.
Now that the “design system” is a solved problem in some companies — or something that can be solved by a templatized solution in others — many are wondering what’s left to do for designers.
My answer has always been to focus on the actual design problem at hand. What are we solving, why and how? Invest in research, make a drawing, validate with stakeholders and then make it as real as possible to present it to the user.
Within the work itself, I think many types of in-between work for UI designers will just simply disappear. Especially for business software based on standard patterns.
Some work that used to take a lot of time will likely be done by less people, sometimes not even designers. Smart front-end developers or product managers will fill gaps where they used to need a designer. This will lead to “mediocre” designers essentially being pushed out of their job.
This then leads me to conclude that the overall level you need as a designer to stand out will be much higher. It’s one of the reasons I’ve decided to narrow my hiring search to freelancers only.
As for how someone can stand out, I keep going back to UX/UI designers with an initial training in either graphic design or front-end development. IGood work is going to come down to being great at your craft, and being dynamic at switching roles in a project. The same work will be done by less people.
As a designer you will need to be able to switch between project roles more fluidly, while at the same time being able to fall back on your initial training and specific UX’er knowledge (research techniques and user-centered design activities).
As a designer, I don’t see the flood of new AI tools as a danger to my job. In fact, I am excited to see how they can help me do a better job.
This post continues my blog posts based on the conclusions of my trip to Belgium. If you are curious, you can read my post from Tuesday about hiring only freelancers (for now) + focus on a design lead and my other post with general end of trip conclusions. After this, one more post is coming up about how the shift to AI affects design work as a whole.
When I created the first Obra homepage it said “Helping startups scale to the next design level”. Many people challenged me on specifically working for startups and they were right.
I started a project for two startups in the first +-2 months of Obra Studio, and I immediately felt it didn’t match with my other vision of scaling up an agency. As an agency you need cashflow, reliability and some level of predictability.
Just for context, what I am working on is to achieve a UI agency focussed on quality user interfaces. As far as headcount I am aiming to work with +-7 people working full-time near the end of the year, eventually scaling to 15-ish team members in a few years.
A friendly CFO focused on startups told me: “Johan, these pre-seed startups, they are struggling for money, they are bootstrapping to the maximum. It’s the worst financial period of their lives. Before funding, there is no money”. I felt his words at a small scale while I was struggling to get budgets and worried what it would be like when I would have to pay a full team.
This does not mean that we won’t work for startups at all; it’s just that I decided our prospective clients are people who want great quality UI, regardless of their company stage. I do have a preference for slightly smaller companies, because that’s where sometimes the interesting action happens.
This is just my current business theory that might need some revision after a while, and I’ll be curious to review this post in one year.
As mentioned in my blog post end of the trip I will post some details the next few days about some conclusions I had during this business trip.
I suppose once I have everything set up, this business blogging will more or less stop, but now that I am actively building the company, it’s interesting to write as a form of thinking. I also get lots of reactions about these posts, incentivizing me to write more.
This post is about hiring and the decisions around that topic.
As posted on LinkedIn, I decided to remove the payroll role. I couldn’t find the right person when it came to skills vs their pay expectations. I got lots of applications from people with too little experience. I got some OK applications from designers with the right experience, but then they had way too high expectations regarding salary.
The mix between high salary costs in Belgium and general averageness of the payroll applications creates a problem for employers. I don’t know if the Belgian government really realizes they are scaring entrepeneurs away, and they are not exactly creating an attractive investment climate.
The mix between high payroll costs, high administrative burdens, and lack of flexibility made me decide to try and find the right combo in freelancers – including Mexican freelancers.
Within this decision, I found a few great designers already, on the Belgian side, who will be the first people helping out Obra ship great design projects for our clients.
Next to the team I already have on call, I need more people with the right skills who can hit the ground running. So if you are a freelancer and have solid UI and/or front-end skills, check out our updated jobs page.
I am looking for people who want to do more than just do the work project-based and can help to build the company; and this both in Belgium and in Mexico city.
As for the business partner, I removed this role from the website. This is an extremely difficult role to hire for. And some signals are telling me it’s not the right choice to put this role with one person. In a small company context, everyone has to help grow the company.
For now, I split up the “business partner” role from the “design lead” role. It was worth a try to try and find a person who could do both, but I think it’s not realistic in the short term. Rather than have a ghost job posting, I would rather have none and work on this problem in the background.
One reasoning I had for the business partner was to run and grow the Belgian part of the company, at all kinds of levels: sales, marketing business development, but then also design leadership in the projects. When I challenged myself on that reasoning, I didn’t really see a reason why there couldn’t be a split between day-to-day work and real-life tasks and the actual growing of the company and business development.
In talks with people I gave the specific examples of answering a Belgian client at 9AM, when I am sleeping in Mexico; and being able to go to physically to a client for workshops and usability testing. I put these tasks with the business partner, but since every individual designer at Obra also talks directly to the clients, why split that up? If anything, I trust the freelancer team I built so far way more to do this than the payrollers I was interviewing. So this can be covered.
Then the business development side, this is actually a separate task, that I am fully commited to. I’ve decided to not actually design too much this year: I am working on the business part of Obra. Every moment should be spent selling, hiring, coaching, mentoring… not designing myself. Except for maybe some AI front-end projects where I can really learn something new and make an epic deliverable for the client.
One danger in hiring is trying to find a copy of yourself: that just doesn’t work. When I do business development and overall project vision, and the designers and front-enders can design and prototype great work, we are essentially complementary. When I try to find a business developer in a designer, I am essentially looking to reflect myself on the Belgium side, which then just leads to a 1 +1 = 2 situation, not 1 + 1 = 3. In times of abundance, maybe it helps to just scale up and make money because the economy is with you, but in times of scarcity, it’s better to deeply think about who you partner up with.
Those are a lot of words and reasonings to find out why you will now find the freelance design lead as a separate job posting.
I have to flesh out the logic behind this job but it would be a contract with a base wage and a specific perf-based aspect. I’d like to thank a specific freelancer (you know who you are) — and my dad — to help bring me to this line of reasoning through our talks.
My business trip to Belgium is nearing it’s end. It’s been a productive three weeks with a lot going on. Now the time comes to return back to Mexico. I can look back at a productive period where I got lots of work done and set up the logic for the rest of the year for Obra Studio.
I gave two talks: a talk about designing with AI at Mobile Vikings and a guest class about understanding user interface design at Artevelde in Ghent (the pandemic version of that talk is here)
I met my startup client Beam and had some real-life workshops/work sessions to move the startup into the right direction
I had some great talks with agency founders, thanks Bert, Pieter-Jan and Thomas for the great discussions.
I had some great conversations with a person who is helping me with business development. He is helping me much more than he realizes (you know who you are!)
I met some prospective team members and potential business partners, and I signed the first Obra employment contract (more on that below)
We signed the first medium-sized project, with some interesting leads for bigger projects. Surprisingly there are quite some leads from the US, which is a great signal.
Over the past next days I will be posting about some conclusions from the trip, both in company positioning, hiring and in the vision of how to incorporate AI into design going forward.
Within AI, there were a few “breakthrough” moments after I thought that there wouldn’t be any breakthrough moments any more.
After OpenAI’s GPT4 released, there was a period of around 6 months where I felt what we could get from AI kind of stagnated.
I felt the quality of images created via Midjourney was kind bad
I felt that AI was semi-useful for some kinds of very concrete coding questions (for example to give you a script that converts Celsius to Fahrenheit) but otherwise not so useful.
I would sometimes use AI as a writing help, to check an article for grammar; or as a quick translator between English and Spanish.
But all in all I felt AI was a helpful tool, but not a revolution.
In artifacts, instead of asking something and getting a text-based answer back, you would get actual rendered piece of UI back that you could see and play with.
In the above screenshot you can see the feature where you have the prompt on the left side, and then a rendered UI piece on the right side. You can also switch to the code as well.
I started experimenting with both Claude and Claude Artifacts and also Cursor and created a first app, that was more or less 90% prompted.
It was called Multi currency Converter, it was a web app written in Svelte. This app converts currencies in more than 140 other currencies.
I started experimenting with how far I could go with Claude + Artifacts.
Turns out, I could go quite far.
The AI would help me with “boring“ tasks. After building the core functionality, where I connected to an external currency API for accurate rates, I easily got the app localized in more than 8 languages, and added dark mode.
At one point, I wondered if I could create a native app with Claude as well, and lo and behold, I got a working version of my multi currency converter app done for iOS and iPadOS in less than a day.
One that included all the features of the web app as well as offline support.
I learned to separate my conversations with Claude by topic. In a way it’s nice to work in one long prompt, because the prompt has context of all your previous questions, but after a while, it breaks down, and sometimes it’s better to work in multiple prompts.
All in all, I was very enthusiastic about Claude and artifacts, but there was another tool in the mix.
Around the same time news around a new code editor called Cursor started popping up. I started seeing this everywhere on Twitter and got super curious.
Cursor is a fork of VS Code that has an integrated panel to ask the AI questions about your code, in the context of a project. Its main feature is something called “composer” you can ask questions about your codebase. Cursor will then help to directly implement the changes.
So instead of the “traditional” approach of asking an LLM and copy pasting the code in your project, the code would change for you directly in the project itself.
This helped immensely when starting to build more complex apps and helped to scale the workflow.
Now, around December I got a new client, with the task to do an application design.
I started with the traditional way of setting up components in Figma. I was doing some detailed designs to experiment with the brand. It was kind of slow to design screens; and I didn’t really have much budget and time.
There was not much budget since it was a pre-seed startup. Not much time since I was also starting up my new business and agency.
I was driven by the idea of validating the ideas behind the screens. I didn’t just want to deliver the client design mockups and be done with it. I wanted to actually knew what people thought and move the product along with user feedback.
In a traditional “design offer” I would have written about going through the motions of designing screens for a few weeks, having weekly meetings about them, and moving towards a clickable Figma prototype.
This is something that we did a lot in the past with my previous agency Mono, we had an alternate offering where we moved towards a front-end based prototype instead of Figma prototypes to go towards a more life-like validation, without actually developing the app.
As a true startup client, the client had lots of feature ideas that kept coming in. Discussions were flowing on Slack and the team was on fire in quick calls. Ultimately what was left for me after those calls was that I saw that there were so many features to design, but that also the core idea behind the whole app was not validated.
I wanted to convince the client to start testing with users too. They were the ones who could tell him his ideas were valid. For this I felt he needed something interactive.
I combined all of the ideas I talked about before, and started making an interactive front-end prototype based on AI. On January 7th of this year, I remembered my success with Cursor and Claude and I started working on the prototype.
Four days later we had a clickable version of the application UI, with many interactive parts. By prompting Claude and separating out the parts of the UI that I needed I got to around 15-ish separate Claude conversations with UI pieces.
I would prompt for the UI parts and iterate on them independently in Claude first.
In Claude, you can also make projects, where you can give top level instructions that apply to all conversations within that project. One of my prompts was that all users of the app were Belgian, so whenever there would be output, like a data list, or a grid of people they should have Belgian names. These top level prompts help you to not have to reprompt for details in every individiual conversations.
I would take screenshots of what I was doing, and bring those back to Figma, to have a bird’s eye view of the project. So, I would have this UI piece in Claude, make a screenshot, put it in Figma, zoom out and see how all the screens connect (and connect them with arrows).
I would also sometimes use the Figma context to think more broadly about the app. In a prompt you are forced to give direct instructions. In a design app a different kind of perspective unlocks for me, where I can think more broadly, place comments and work on more abstract thinking. This output piece also helped a lot when having meetings with a bigger project team to get to a shared understanding.
So, how does it all tie together? At a certain point I would have like 10 separate Claude conversations, and the general wireframe idea in Figma based on screenshots.
In a next step, I would download the code for all the UI parts in Claude and copy that code into a fresh Next.js app. I would create an overview page where would I clearly link to every UI part. Having an overview page is a common thing to do in wireframes so that a client can validate all the possible UI paths.
Now came the part where different UI parts needed to be combined. I would use Cursor to have an understanding of the whole codebase and start connecting every part of the app with a sidebar component. To work faster, I would use a dictation app called wispr flow, to give detailed prompts inside of Cursor.
To work faster, I also never bothered with changing much of the defaults that came out of Cursor. Even though I have opinions on their tech stack, it was ultimately quite irrelevant for me, because
I am not actually working in the code; I am prompting and changing stuff
This is a prototype meant for validation, not for production
As a result, we created a prototype with 7 different modules, there are two main user perspectives to it (a user facing public part and an expert backoffice app part), and 20 different connected UI screens. The screens themselves had a moderate complexity level (a calendar, some CRUD modules for content, a block-based editor) with one of them having a bit more complexity (the part where you edit your profile with a live preview next to it).
I was so enthusiastic about this workflow. The client was super stoked with the result.
“Quite flabbergasted by the demo that is there guys. Amazing stuff!”
I asked him to use the prototype to test with his prospective users and a few days later he came back with enthusiastic reports, where he showed the prototype to the prospective users and they could really imagine what it was like to use the app.
My goal of getting a user-testable app prototype was achieved; and we did this work in a few days, instead of what used to take a few weeks (excluding an initial design phase).
A presentation-version of this blog post with more details was delivered earlier this month at a private company presentation.
This blog post shows the seeds of a new workflow that will definitely influence how we makes prototypes at Obra. Have a software company and curious to ship faster? Get in touch.
