About 6 months ago I decided we needed to change the way our website worked. It was too passive. It was also solution oriented. In other words, it didn’t do much to interact with the user to understand their needs and provide solutions that made sense for them. In many ways it was a digital brochure. How 1999 of us. I had at least 5 ideas of how I was going to improve the user experience. To be honest, I hadn’t done website design work in a very long time. I didn’t even know what tool to open. My daughter was visiting and she’s a first-year UX designer for a digital products studio. I asked her what tools she used to do her design work. She said, “Lovable, mostly.” 

Vibe coding changes everything

The last thing I want this blog post to be is an ad for Lovable. Generally speaking I am tool agnostic. Use the one that works for you. That said, at her recommendation, I jumped into Lovable. In two hours I had 5 different clickable prototypes mocked up and working on the data already on our website. Now, I know you’ve heard this story already, probably 50 times from friends, colleagues, parents and CEO’s. “Vibe coding is my jam!” and all that blah blah blah. And, frankly, this story is no different. Vibe coding did change everything. 

A year ago I would have debated which ideas to focus on first, how to design them and what tool to use to build them. It would have taken at least a week to get an idea in front of my colleagues. From there we’d have to imagine much of the website’s functionality and make risky assumptions on what it might do differently than it does today. And then we’d start testing it. Last year I did all of this in a day. We shifted the debate from “should we do this?” to “which way works best for our customer?”

Demos over debates

For the past 20 years I’ve advocated for testing your ideas before production with “the least amount of work you need to do to test the next most important thing.” And up until the last year or so that typically involved customer conversations first followed by an increasing level of fidelity to your prototype testing. Talking to your customers has never been more important. The incorporation of that feedback and insight, however, can now be done exponentially faster to move the debate forward with a steady cadence of demonstrations. 

The debates about what we should build now give way to what we need to learn next. Each time customer insight comes back, initially from conversations and then from vibe coded prototypes, we can iterate our work forward much faster than before. The demos aren’t finished design. They’re not finished code either. They are experiments that move us up the truth curve in a way we couldn’t do before. 

Better tools, better conversations

I’ve never been more convinced about the benefits of good user experience design and research work as the competitive differentiator in modern digital product development. The AI-powered tools we have now move us from the realm of imagination and speculation to the realm of continuous demonstration. The debates we need to have must change. Rather than endlessly speculate about a particular direction, we can create several variations, identify the ones we believe have the best chance to succeed and start testing. As long as we iterate forward with learning in mind and are clear about how the changes in our prototypes are going to teach us the next most important thing, we’re doing good product discovery work. 

P.S. – Remember, these tools are for learning and discovery. Eventually good design principles need to be applied to validated experiments. Without that, the bots will design us all into a boring state of mediocrity. 

P.P.S. – Want help with this type of work? This is what we do at Sense & Respond Learning. You should have a look at our courses and workshops.