Obra Insur

We live in weird times at the moment. You can go to Claude and ask it to “give you a React component for a dashboard” and it will come up with something halfway decent. Work that used to take days, can now be handled in hours. Where does that leave UI designers? I believe regardless of the speed gains that AI provides, a good interface still needs a lof ot thinking.

AI will generate sloppy work and drop the ball when it comes to the details. But it can also do amazing things that I could never code before.

At Obra we've been experimenting with different tools like Claude, Subframe and Magic Patterns. Are these tools a silver bullet to get to better UI designs? Of course not. They are a tool to get to a result faster.

For example, for years, I've promoted data-driven design. If you're doing an interface to select a car, get a list of cars. If you show a list of people, make it realistic.

It's a basic designer technique by now to use a plugin like Google Sheets sync to get data in your interfaces. You'd set up a spreadsheet and then sync that data to your UI. With AI tools, the game changes: you just prompt the data, and the AI knows where to update the UI.

Please consider the user interface below. It was made using Subframe.

Quotes screen

Client detail screen

Clients screen

What you see is probably a decent looking interface. However, looks can be deceiving. While this is a decent shadcn-based UI, quite little consideration has been given to the actual use of the interface.

If I had to critique this piece of work I'd have a lot of comments. What's the point of those widgets, when they are not interactive? Do you really need to see company and team settings at all times? Does it make sense to have a refresh and a filter button on the top right, when there is a direct filter for “Provider” and “Insurance type” on top already?

Just like AI cannot generate literature, it cannot generate great interfaces. It's easy to mistake this for good work, because it looks good; but it has so many basic problems, I would be ashamed to present this to a client.

At Obra Studio, we are exploring how we can make the best use of AI tools within design work. This is a subject that currently changes almost weekly as new tools come out and people get accustomed to new workflows.

We don't have all the answers, but we like to share our knowledge. Check out our page about integrating AI tools into design processes and do read our blog where we share what we’re up to.