Our take on Intercom's 3-point framework for AI driven design

For a long time, we've been big believers in designers owning part of the front-end. Now, AI enables designers to do more. Inspired by Intercom's recent article about their 3-point framework for AI-driven design, here's Obra Studio's founder Johan's take.

Intercom recently posted their three-step framework to expand designers' roles at Intercom:

1. Designers shipping code: Every designer is shipping directly to production, fixing UX debt and bugs, updating content and continuously improving the experience.
2. Vibe coding the roadmap: We can now create highly-convincing interactive prototypes that we use to directly influence our product roadmap.
3. Owning the entire frontend: Designers at Intercom are now building entire features and screens.

Let's dive into these three points and how we see them.

1. Designers shipping code

Thom Rimmer and Emmet Connolly describe how designers at Intercom have been shipping PRs. They also describe a situation where before, design issues would land in tickets, and then end up way down the priority list.

I too have seen product teams deprioritizing issues that designers care about from fixing alignment issues to fixing accessibility flaws or improving animations.

The issue is oftentimes exacerbated by handing these issues to a developer who doesn't own the problem (e.g. interface copy) and just treats the issue at face value, often leading to half-solved issues, or one issue becoming many (I call this issue snowballing).

In recent years, front-end stacks have gotten more complicated. Many codebases that were once understandable for someone who knows HTML and CSS became much more complicated, mostly as a result of JS-heavy stacks.

Personally, as someone who's been writing front-end code as a designer for his whole career, I've tried to keep up with the evolutions and over the years taught myself to navigate al kinds of codebases. When working on web apps, I primarily work in a designer role, but when given the chance it's only natural to be writing HTML, CSS and JS to bring my design ideas to life.

I've dabbled in writing native apps, via React Native and Swift UI, but generally leave this part to the actual full-time developers. I find that there's a lot of value in a role that sits in the middle between design and engineering. With our Obra Support package, we help product teams fill this role.

However, not every designer is well versed in code, and within our team, there's a 50% split between those who code and those who don't. The designers who do not code have their own strengths: mostly a much deeper care and strengths in the visual side of things.

What is exciting to me about designers shipping code — and what AI enables — is that for a specific subset of changes, the barrier to entry to fix certain issues becomes much lower. With the right setup, you don't have to figure out the whole dev stack to ship a copy change. You could do it from a Github PR.

Frustrations about not having your design shipped as you envisioned it can be remedied; issues that are important to designers but that are de-prioritized by the general dev team can still be handled in a product context. This gives designers ownership and reduces unnecessary back-and-forth.

2. Vibe coding the roadmap

The next point Thom and Emmet make is that vibe coding has been a huge unlock for their design team’s ability to influence what we build next.

From our agency perspective, vibe coding is something we mostly do within our Obra Ignite package, as a way to validate startup ideas.

Clients come to us with their pre-funding startup idea. For a relatively low budget, we build out an MVP that they can take on the road and present to friends and family, possible prospects, possible investors... the general idea is to show a working prototype to as many people as you can, in order to validate your startup ideas.

The biggest advantage to this approach is that, unlike a sketch or a wireframe, the vibe-coded designs are so close to a real app that founders can use them to test and learn. What often happens is that from the initial insights, changes are made to land with a super convincing demo that can be used for sales, while the developers go on to build the real thing.

With the right input, a prototype that used to take weeks to make can now be made in a few days. One of those prototypes helped our client Beam raise €300 000 in seed funding.

AI enables designers with front-end knowledge to go further: if you know what you want, and you are able to prompt it accurately, vibe coding unlocks a level of interactive coding that used to be reserved for Javascript wizards.

3. Designers owning the Frontend

Point 3 that the authors of the article describe is probably the point I disagree with the most: designers owning the front-end.

The authors describe a situation where engineers handle the back-end, and designers evolve toward owning the interface. I realize this point is an extrapolation and not the real situation at Intercom, but I think the authors are dreaming up a situation that mixes up two roles.

Just because designers can help with the front-end, doesn't mean designers will ultimately end up owning the front-end. Emphasis on the word owning.

I think front-end engineers should own the front-end. Front-end development is a job in its own right. Sure, some designers are good at front-end code, but these profiles are rare, and even then, they tend to only be good at some specific parts. Ask a skilled front-end designer to write beautiful CSS or fix an accessibility issue and you'll get a good solution; but it's likely a bad idea to let them wrangle complex Typescript types, write tests or design a proper API.

I would summarize my opinion on Intercom's 3 points as follows:

• Designers shipping code as PRs that get approved by engineers, when all tests are green: yes!
• Designers that vibe code a prototype that serves as inspiration for where to take a product: 100%.
• Designers owning the front-end? I think that's taking things a bit too far.

Conclusion

Overall we are excited about the possibilities that AI offers for designers to contribute to the front-end; to vibe code ideas; but ultimately, front-end engineers have the skills to take ownership of the actual production front-end.