Designers & Developers

October 22, 2023


I talked to J today, a UX designer.

He interviewed 16 designers and developers and there are 3 common themes of issues they face in collaborating.

  1. Lack of documentation
  2. Communication gaps
  3. Lack of context

The idea is to have LLMs to have context of conversations between the designers and developers in a team, so that they can collaborate better.

He mentioned feeding it the Design System of a company, which is unique to each company. And have access to the file system to see file changes.

The idea could be to have a landing page to serve as the ground truth, the status of the project, issues being worked on, pain points, etc.

I liked the idea of having an agent pull up relevant information in a chat while you're talking to someone. It's like having a personal assistant.

Designers have this vision of how the product should look like, the user experience, while developers just want to build it.

There's a lot of back and forth between the two, and it's hard to keep track of the changes. Requirements also change every week, so designs have to be updated.

It's interesting to think about how LLMs can fit into this workflow.

I told him that I believe designers can be developers in the future, and it's easier for designers to code than developers to learn design, and he thought the exact opposite.

LLMs are already being used internally in companies to help boost productivity and collaboration.

It's just a matter of time before your coworker(s) is a locally-hosted LLM model that you can talk to, instead of waiting for a response from another team/department.