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Claire Vo
Can you show us how you get these prototyping tools to prototype your product?
Colin Matthews
So here's our component. All I have to do is click convert to component, throw it into my chat parity library, and now it's going to import basically all of that styling and structure and regenerate it as like a proper component. So you can see the prompt here is basically all of the code from your website.
Claire Vo
You used to have to know how to code or get really good at figma. And now we have unleashed the product manager with these chat based prototyping tools. You have this prompt that lets you extract those components out of a screenshot.
Colin Matthews
So I'll say create a homepage for Airbnb and basically assemble a homepage using those components. You want to match your existing design with a screenshot. You can paste that in to start, then you add your new AI feature on top or whatever you want.
Claire Vo
Oh, look at this. It's Airbnb.
Colin Matthews
These tools can be used by anyone on the team. Your operations team could prototype something and send it to you. Our customer success could use these tools. There's no limit on who's allowed to have ideas.
Claire Vo
Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Yeah, yeah. The word of the year is vibe code. But if I had to pick a close number two, it would be prototype. That's why I'm excited to have on Colin Matthews, who's going to show product managers and designers how they can take screenshots and turn them into component libraries for your favorite prototyping tool to use. Use a Chrome extension to rip your exact code to pull in to integrate with AI tooling and how to use a fork to bring some sanity to your AI prototypes and designs. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Work os. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop in APIs for enterprise features so your app can become enterprise ready and scale upmarket faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, perplexity and cursor are already using work OS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders@workos.com start building today. Colin, thanks for being here.
Colin Matthews
Yeah, super excited to join.
Claire Vo
So one of the things product managers love right now is they are super empowered to prototype. You used to have to know how to code or get really good at figma, and now we have unleashed the product manager with these kind of chat based prototyping tools. But one of the problems that I found as somebody who is trying to bring these prototyping tools into a larger company is they're not, at least in my experience, particularly good at replicating your brand, your design system, your patterns. And so you sort of annoy the product managers and engineers first by doing all this work that no one asks you to do, and then two, you're not giving them assets that match the brand and the design system. But you seem to have figured this out. So can you show us how you get these prototyping tools to prototype your product?
Colin Matthews
The concept here is actually pretty simple, comes kind of from the design world of having a component library. So you can see here I have kind of a Mach 1 of Airbnb. And I'll start by saying that this approach is applicable to any tool. So it's not like a V0 thing or a bold thing or anything like that. It's just the idea of basically creating these components first rather than starting with your views. So I'll talk a little bit about how I actually go about accomplishing this in v0, and then we'll talk about some other tools that maybe like streamline this process a little bit for us. First things first is I just have a prompt that I typically use and I'm happy to share this with the audience as well. Later on, I have a little prompt library for myself. And this prompt is a prompt to create a component library. So I tell the AI model that is tasked with creating this component library based on a screenshot using a set of technologies, I kind of outline what the behavior should be and what we want as a result. Sometimes it listens, sometimes it still tries to replicate the view. And so sometimes you really have to push it on, like only create the components. I want the page to be a list of components. I don't want you to create the views because I think these tools have kind of been pre trained to create the Views instead. And so that's pretty much it. I take this prompt and I throw in an initial screenshot. And if I scroll back a little bit here in my chat, you'll see that a lot of my requests to this particular project are generated just screenshots in the prompt. Please continue adding components. And so I very literally go through. And once I kind of have this initial setup, so I have my component library, it starts adding a couple of components, I start just sending in screenshots one kind of page at a time.
Claire Vo
And for people listening, just to call out. Kind of what you're seeing here is it seems like you're taking screenshots from different parts of the app. This example is Airbnb, and you're actually pulling out things like the logo, the search bar, non navigation of category items, how ratings work, property cards. So these foundational UX elements that compose this very complex app, and you have this prompt that lets you extract those components out of a screenshot.
Colin Matthews
Yeah, that's exactly right. And there's kind of two main benefits to this. So obviously right now we don't have what I'd consider to be a prototype, but what we can do is very easily turn this into a prototype so we can keep this kind of visual consistency, not only in our own prototypes, like if I'm doing two different ideas, but also if you're working with me, I can share this component library with you. And now, across the team, our prototypes all have a very similar style or visual consistency. And so I can just run through how to do that. It's pretty simple. We're going to use this fork feature up in the top right hand corner, which basically creates a copy of the project. So it'll import all of the same files that we had in the original. And this allows us to not make any changes to the component library, but still use all those files. And then from here, we basically ask it to build us something. So I'll say create a homepage for Airbnb, and it will take all of that existing code that we have, so all of these files that represent our components, and basically assemble a homepage using those components. And if there's something missing, like some UI element that it wants to add that doesn't exist in the components, it will create them as needed, but generally speaking, it will just inherit those existing components.
Claire Vo
Got it. And just looking here at the list of components you were able to generate in that prompt, it looks like you have two dozen different components. Everything from the logo to what the reserve button looks like host information. And so you've been able to very quickly get the building blocks of Airbnb and matching the brand, matching the UX style, because you've used the screenshot and now you're taking those different Lego pieces and composing it into something new for the product.
Colin Matthews
Yeah, exactly. And then we can kind of continue from there the same way we normally would with prototyping. Right. So if you want to match your existing design with a screenshot, you can paste that in to start. It'll use all these components, then you add like, you know, your new AI feature on top or whatever you want.
Claire Vo
Look at this. It's Airbnb.
Colin Matthews
There we go. So, yeah, works pretty good. So we have the Airbnb logo, we have the search bar that we'd expect. We have a of lot, all the various components that we're used to. Right. And there are a lot of components that didn't end up getting used here. So for example, if I ask it to build a detail screen, then it's going to continue. Right. To use the components. So it's selecting the relevant components to use. It's not just going to import my 30 components into the homepage just for fun. Lots of these, like the amenities section, the bedroom card, the booking card, these are all things that we need in the listing page. And you can see right at the top here, it's just listing out all of the components it's importing for that detail screen, Right?
Claire Vo
Yep. And what I would say is something like Airbnb is a well known brand, well known ui and this is pretty close. But are you aiming for pixel perfect? What are you trying to get when it comes to building this component library?
Colin Matthews
Yeah, typically not pixel perfect, it is still a little challenging. You'll notice that, like, some of the icons are not like their particular set of icons. The images are a little bit off and so usually it's not exact matches. The goal is typically to represent the product in a way that doesn't make people feel like you're talking about a different topic. They want to be able to look at and be like, oh yeah, that's Airbnb. And now you're showing me the new AI Experiences feature where it's going to plan my whole trip for me. And so we're focused really on whatever it is you're prototyping, but we just don't want to distract people with a UI that looks nothing like the product.
Claire Vo
Yeah. And if I think about kind of these prototyping tools out of the box, I tell People, they're great. They're great wireframing tools in that they tend to come pre baked with these monochrome, very clean, nice to use and accessible UI components, but rarely matches the unique brand that you have. And so this is almost like better than a wireframe. It's not a pixel perfect spec, but it gives you the sense of how the UI might look with your brand attached and some familiar elements.
Colin Matthews
Yeah, exactly. So hopefully we can give this a try here. I think we've wrapped up and if I click on this or perhaps I go to a. I didn't set up the routing. That's one other small thing. Often it'd be very specific. So we can ask it to set up the routing here as well. But I'll try just throwing in a number and see if that brings us to a property. Yeah, so we have to go property and then page. Let's try that property and one. And hopefully we get our listings page. So this isn't quite right. Some of this is a little bit off, but we can see we have our booking card component and a lot of the other components that we have which make this look almost the same as Airbnb. Right. Like it's pretty close.
Claire Vo
That's amazing. That looks really good. And all those components look very familiar, very consistent. Airbnb team, look at this. We did some, we did some work for you. And I think this solves actually a very big problem for adoption of these tools inside teams, which is teams don't want to look at prototypes that don't look like their own product. And you're showing sort of a third party product. But obviously this is something that napm or design team can set up for themselves.
Colin Matthews
Yeah, exactly. And I agree on the adoption side. The other thing is just like if you do a decent job, so you put a little bit of effort into those components, these tools seem to do a good job of stitching them together. So I find that I get many fewer errors because I have this kind of modular structure already. It's already broken down and really all the code is doing is stitching them together. And so again, from an onboarding perspective, it just feels like a kind of a level up in terms of the product itself, the prototyping product.
Claire Vo
And are there other tools? I mean, this is, was so fast. So it's hard to, it's hard to complain about the process. But you know, you showed that you had to do some prompting to continue to generate components. Are there other tools that you use to do this kind of work? Is V0, your favorite. How do you think about it?
Colin Matthews
Yeah, so there's one other tool that I am currently in love with, which is magic patterns. And you know, I did work with this team. I did a little bit of advising with them for about a month, but they've been working on this problem for like two and a half years. The two founders are both engineers who are very design forward design centric. And yeah, they built something really special here, I think. So I'm going to show you a demo first and then I'll show you how it works. So you'll notice that in the bottom right hand corner here it says using Chat prd. I'm going to explain what this is in just a minute, but we're going to start by just saying, let's say create an AI chat that can help me with my PRDs.
Claire Vo
Oh no, there's no motes.
Colin Matthews
Yeah, potentially, at least not on the design side. So what it's going to do here is follow a very similar structure to what we just went through. You don't see it, but behind the scenes there's a bunch of components that I have pre built in order to kind of very similarly inject them into the background here. And I'll highlight specifically in the UI where you see that happening, but it's going to assemble those components and again add kind of anything else it needs in order to make this work. So you'll see it is actually installing these components from its own kind of repository of code and then it's creating a new component called Chat interface that kind of wraps everything up together.
Claire Vo
Were these components created in a similar fashion to what we saw before with screenshots or they can create it in a different way?
Colin Matthews
Yeah, created in a different way and I'll say probably like a more convenient way. And I'll definitely show you how to do that. So we'll give this one second to wrap up here and then we'll be able to hopefully see something similar to Chat prd. And yeah, I mean you'll see like the length of kind of how far you can go to make it look like your product is pretty far.
Claire Vo
I mean, that's generally her. I will say my colors are a little bit more subtle on some of the pieces, but you got, you got it pretty. Pretty, right?
Colin Matthews
Yeah. So there's. I don't know why this picture of this man here, but that's okay. So yeah, just to go over really quick, you can see here we have a sidebar component, we have a chat message component. Message Input, options, menu and so on. So basically all of these predefined UI elements that we want to work with. Well, I'll just highlight really quick. Like we can just get rid of this by clicking on here and clicking delete, which is a nice little feature.
Claire Vo
So much we're deleting a random icon of a man that has made it.
Colin Matthews
Into this prototype or trying to get rid of him anyway. He's stubborn apparently, but yeah. So this is the gist and obviously from here we continue as normal in terms of the prototyping.
Claire Vo
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Colin Matthews
Little bit about like how I actually put this together. The process is relatively straightforward. So let's actually head over to Chat Purity and I'll just log in really quick and you know, I'm on the, on the homepage here and let's say I want to head over to Documents and I want to kind of take a look at this table here. Maybe we'll do chats so we have some content in it. So what I can do is use the Magic patterns Chrome extension, select the UI element, click it and just pull it out.
Claire Vo
For those that are listening, I just made my patented scream face on screen because that is quite clever.
Colin Matthews
Yeah. So here's our component. All I have to do is click convert to component, throw it into my chat PRD library of components, and now it's going to import basically all of that styling and structure and regenerate it as like a proper component. So you can see the prompt here is basically all of the code from your website, the HTML.
Claire Vo
Yep.
Colin Matthews
And then rebuild it into a real Component that can, you know, have data inserted into it because it's a table, and then we can reuse that as much as we want. So that's like the workflow, right, is go to your website, click the button in the top right corner, start extracting stuff, build out your component library, and then reassemble your Legos however you want.
Claire Vo
Yeah. I'm thinking about how teams are trying to bite this off today, which is they're like, pretty please design engineer or front engineer, can you give me this code? Or create all these components and put them in a way that my AI can extract them. And no front end engineer wants to go do that, that work to extract these components, extract the functionality out of them. Because I found that's often part of the challenge with importing components into prototyping tools is the components often contain logic that the prototype doesn't. And you want to like pull all that out. You really just want the styling and visualization. And so product managers and designers are left to sort of fend for themselves in creating not pixel perfect, but approximate code. And so this is a really interesting flow I haven't ever seen before where you can just browser plugin, copy amino select and import some code and then again use AI to reassemble it.
Colin Matthews
Yeah, exactly. So we have our component here, we'll go ahead and publish it. And this gets into like another section of maybe a little bit more advanced of like versioning. So let's go back to this prior example here and take a look at the code. We can actually see that we, we have these component imports. If we wanted to, we could put more effort into these components, continue to change them over time, and then just click upgrade to latest to get the new component in the old things that we prototyped. So I would argue the further down this path you start to go, which is turning everything into individual components and managing them that way, kind of like the more leverage you get. Right. You can even put someone in charge of making sure that these components are really high visual fidelity and you don't lose that work. It's not like stuck in one prototype. Right. It's an asset your team can use.
Claire Vo
Yeah. I heard somebody recently say with more text based work, they never think about improving the output, they always think about improving the prompt. And this is the kind of prototyping version of it is like, don't think about improving the composed application, actually think about improving the components and then the composed application can follow downstream from that. So it's a really interesting way to think about what are the primitives of prototypes and how you can iterate on both the primitive and the composition?
Colin Matthews
Right. And then what we end up with is a state where the prompting doesn't actually matter as much. Right. Like we can start to move away from. If you say like the right incantation of magic words, you get, you get a great output. And if you don't, you know, it's just a mess because we have these primitives that are getting assembled and so the AI has less heavy lifting to do because we've done some of that.
Claire Vo
Pre work well and you know, we're all good citizens and I'm sure people aren't out there using this chrome extension to copy other people's components. And yet if there is a design system that you really, that really inspires you and you don't know how to recreate it, you know, you want something that looks like this or works like this. It's a new way to kind of clip different UX inspiration. And hopefully, I hope people, instead of creating, you know, a carbon copy, create something that is your own, that meets your own user needs, but that can take inspiration from other, other sites and interaction patterns.
Colin Matthews
Yeah, exactly. And then, yeah, I just kind of. One last thing to show you. So we talked a lot about components and I showed you how forking works with the component Library. Over in V0 we have a very similar function here in Magic Patterns. And so we're going to talk a little bit more about like the overall idea of using forks for prototyping. So I'm going to start actually by adding this to a project. This again is a feature that's somewhat unique. So we'll call this1chat prd where it basically puts your chat on a visual canvas and so it makes it easier for you to see more than one chat at the same time. So you can see I have now this chat here and if I want to hop back into it, I can just click on this little kind of code icon here. A little small, but hop back in there. And so let's say that this isn't quite the best baseline, but let's say that this was my baseline. I put a little bit of effort into it and this is a good representation of the product as it is today. Then what I can do is I can just create a copy, right? And now I've created a copy that has all my components and I'm not starting from scratch again. So again we have the visual consistency. I can hop into the copy and I can start to prompt on Top of this one. So I can say implement a functional chat, because we're missing that right now, and start from this point. So again, as a team, what you can have is your set of baseline prototypes, which is a starting point assembled from your components. And then when you want to prototype anything, it turns out that your prompting goes down to one or two messages. Right. Because you're already starting from such a great place.
Claire Vo
Well, and for the designers listening, that visual canvas that the prototype was on looks very similar to figma in that you have this open board, you have a frame that, that encapsulates the prototype and a little screenshot of the prototype and then you really can duplicate, not just the screenshot, the actual full chat, full functionality, etc, and fork it. You know, create a, create a little branch off of it, fork it and continue to iterate there. And then I'm presuming you could bop back and see those two different versions side by side.
Colin Matthews
Yeah, exactly. So I'll try to get this working here. We'll say have the new chat button route to our functional chat, we'll see if we can get something kind of working as a demo. But yeah, exactly. Right. So at any point in time, we could just head back over to the project and we're going to have those kind of two options available. And so what I do, and I'll show you in just a minute, is I actually label them. I label the first one as a baseline, and then I label the following ones as like var 1, var 2, var 3, with another kind of description beside it. And so I can say, like, okay, for this feature that I'm interested in, here's maybe like one or two ways to explore this feature. And it makes it extremely easy to kind of go down that path of exploration.
Claire Vo
And again, I think designers in particular are very used to that. I was a designer back in the day when we did things truly in files, no figma, and you had like design v1, v2 final, this one, copy final. Really this one. So you're just, you're giving me a little throwback to, to how iterative design used to work back in the day.
Colin Matthews
Yeah, right. So, yeah, you can see we have our, our two side by side. And if I was to hop over to my baseline, I would just label it like that, say baseline. And then, you know, this would be like whatever we wanted to var one and then whatever, let's say functional chat and so on. And so you can continue this pattern kind of as much as you want, you know, and have whatever Sets of baseline prototypes you want to start from.
Claire Vo
Yeah, and just, you know, maybe a tip for folks coming to some of these AI tools. Whether you're a product manager or designer, an engineer, some concepts you want to think about understanding and building into your workflow are concepts of like, checkpoints, versions, and forks. So when you've got something that works, the number one mistake is to keep vibe coding without a checkpoint or a commit or a version. And then it's very hard to wind yourself back to what you like. So anytime you think you found something that you like, make a checkpoint, make a copy. When you want to explore, but are sure where that exploration is going to take, you fork it so you don't break. Break your kind of main thing. And then if you want to share a baseline again, I like this concept of, like a baseline chat, a baseline prompt, a baseline prototype that you can share with your team, and they can iterate and explore without breaking your stuff as well.
Colin Matthews
Yeah, exactly. And it kind of goes back again to that, like, onboarding experience, because I know some people, like, they open Up Bolt or V0, they type something in, and they just get error after error after error. Right. And it's, like, not the best experience for your team. And so instead, you're kind of equipping them to actually be successful with the tool without having to try to figure it out themselves. Right. Like, it's going to look like the product. You're giving them a set of UI elements that they're familiar with, and then they ask, like, hey, could you add this thing? And it just works.
Claire Vo
So you've shown us you can replicate Airbnb, very complex, beautiful consumer user experience. You can replicate the impeccable chat prd, at least to some fidelity. Here you can iterate. You've taught us what a component is, you know, and this is all coming from you. From a product background, from an organization perspective, I have a have a couple questions for you. You've shown us how to do this technically. How do you pull this off? In a team with egos and roles and responsibilities, how do you approach that part?
Colin Matthews
Well, if there's any designers listening, you'll probably appreciate this. I think it just starts with empathy, to be honest. So I've had this question come up a lot, and usually my recommendation is to not go and prototype, like, a whole new feature and then hand to your designer and be like, hey, could you clean this up for me? Like, I already, you know, kind of did the work. And usually it starts with, like, the understanding that these tools can be used by anyone on the team. It can even be used by people outside of product. Like your operations team could prototype something and send it to you, be like, hey, this is what I thought would be useful for our internal tool or customer success. Could use these tools to talk to you a little bit about this customer thought and do some live prototyping. There's no limit on who's allowed to have ideas. And then from there kind of bringing the whole team along to make sure that, you know, the designer understands that, you know, this isn't replacing the role. You know, it's basically just a way to communicate internally. Same with engineering. Like, you do have the ability to sync this code to GitHub if you want, but it's just a starting point. If they want to use it, they can. If it's not useful, then they shouldn't. And so I think it's really more about like enabling people to do their jobs faster, better, you know, be a little bit more inclusive with the set of people who can actually, like, communicate their ideas effectively and hopefully just like get to the right outcome earlier on.
Claire Vo
And my second question is, you are a very structured prototyper here, probably one of the most structured one I've seen. But do you ever let yourself ride the wave of vibe coding and let the components take you where they will? Where do you decide to go with the exact structure and where do you decide to be a little bit more.
Colin Matthews
Freeform in the prompting techniques? No, I'm very structured and how I approach it, even in cursor. I have my cursor rules files and all that stuff. I have everything set up the way that I like and very clean code structures because I find that when I don't do it that way, I spend more time debugging than going down the path that I want to go down in terms of actual features, definitely from more of a product perspective and less of an implementation perspective. I will go and test an idea and see if it works. And if it doesn't work, then I kind of give up. So one idea I had a while back was kind of like a wrapper around prototypes where you could collect analytics data, kind of like post hog or amplitude, but specifically for prototypes. And so I built that in cursor. I tried it out, I tested it with a few folks. It didn't really resonate and so I threw it away. And so that's the way I think I explore more, less so on the get actual prompting side.
Claire Vo
Got it. Okay, so you are, you're. I mean, I can tell you've got your notion workbook of prompts, you've got your components, you're a man that likes structure. I am very different. I want to just go where the LLM takes me, ride the wave of the tokens, generate what we will. Okay, and then my final question. Love to ask everybody this. You're structured so you probably don't have this problem. But when AI does not listen, when it will not delete this dude off of my prototype who he's still there sitting on the, the, the fake chat. Purity prototype. What's your prompting tactic? Do you have like a mean prompt in your prompt library that you pull out of your pocket?
Colin Matthews
No, unfortunately not. I am actually very nice to the AIs just in case. No. So usually it is like asking it to explain what's happening. So actually we'll go through a quick example here. So this is my most common prompt, is explain to me why this is happening. Don't write any code. Literally just getting the AI to first tell you what's happening and then secondly implementing a solution I have found is the most effective way to basically get it to behave. So I'll do that here. I'll kind of click on our friend, once again, add into the chat and say, I tried to delete this but it didn't work. Can you explain why? And then don't code. And again, like I use this for errors. So if there's an error, I copy paste the error. Say, can you explain what's going on here? Don't rcode any type of, like literally any type of problem that I come up against. This is the same pattern that I use. And I think it makes sense because like we know that the planning step is important. Like when you're prompting, it's kind of just continuing that pattern while you're talking. Right. So making sure you have a plan while you're, you know, making your changes.
Claire Vo
Yeah, I use a very similar prompt when dealing with errors where I say, explain why this error is happening and give me your top three hypotheses on why in priority order. Because, and, and don't code. I also say and don't code. These, these AI agents are very eager to write code, so you have to often instruct it not to. That's a, that's a really great prompting technique. So again, you probably. Your response to it, not listening is another well structured.
Colin Matthews
Well, yeah, that's right.
Claire Vo
Well, Colin, this has been very fun. Super useful. I'm going to take this into my team and we're going to go build out a big component library that we can use to prototype. So where can our listeners find us and how can we be helpful to you?
Colin Matthews
Yeah, so a couple places. One, I am teaching on Maven, so if you want to take a course on this topic, I kind of go through, you know, all the tips and tricks on, on this as well as getting a little bit more technical. I think that's one of the things that differentiates folks and their skill here is actually being able to communicate to the LLM effectively, which requires a little bit of technical knowledge. So that's the course over on Maven. AI prototyping for PMs. And then recently I've actually kind of stood up offering directly for teams that want to start going down this path. So over at teams.techforproduct.com, i have like a one day, six hour course. You can bring your whole team and then you'll end up with those assets that we talked about. So you'll leave kind of with a good idea about who's doing what, the component libraries and then your baseline prototypes kind of hit the ground running. So. Yeah. And then finally, you know, LinkedIn substack if you were just looking for more casual stuff.
Claire Vo
Great. Well Colin, thanks for showing all this. It's awesome.
Colin Matthews
Yeah, no problem. Happy to be here.
Claire Vo
Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show@howiaipod.com See you next time.
Podcast Summary: How I AI – Episode: "How to Build Prototypes That Actually Look Like Your Product" with Colin Matthews
Released on June 30, 2025
Host: Claire Vo
Introduction
In this engaging episode of How I AI, host Claire Vo welcomes Colin Matthews, a seasoned product leader and AI prototyping instructor at Maven. Together, they delve into the transformative world of AI-powered prototyping tools, exploring how these technologies empower product managers and designers to create more accurate and brand-aligned prototypes without extensive coding or design expertise.
Empowering Product Managers with AI Tools
Claire kicks off the discussion by highlighting the evolution of prototyping tools enabled by AI. Traditionally, creating high-fidelity prototypes required deep coding knowledge or advanced skills in design tools like Figma. However, with the advent of chat-based AI prototyping tools, product managers are now empowered to translate ideas into visual prototypes effortlessly.
Claire Vo [00:20]: "You used to have to know how to code or get really good at Figma. And now we have unleashed the product manager with these chat-based prototyping tools."
Colin confirms this shift, emphasizing that these AI tools democratize the prototyping process, allowing team members across various departments—operations, customer success, and more—to contribute ideas and create prototypes without bottlenecks.
Colin Matthews [00:48]: "These tools can be used by anyone on the team. There’s no limit on who's allowed to have ideas."
Building a Component Library
A central theme of the episode is the importance of a component library in maintaining design consistency. Colin explains his structured approach to prototyping, which starts with creating a comprehensive library of UI components derived from existing product screenshots.
Colin Matthews [03:41]: "The concept here is actually pretty simple, coming kind of from the design world of having a component library."
By extracting individual components—such as logos, search bars, and buttons—from screenshots, Colin ensures that all future prototypes adhere to the brand's design system. This method not only preserves visual consistency but also streamlines the prototyping process.
Demonstration: Prototyping Airbnb
To illustrate his methodology, Colin walks Claire through a live demonstration using Airbnb as an example. By inputting a screenshot of Airbnb's homepage into the AI tool, he showcases how the system intelligently identifies and extracts various UI components.
Colin Matthews [07:00]: "These tools are selecting the relevant components to use. It’s not just going to import my 30 components into the homepage just for fun."
This approach allows for the rapid assembly of a functional prototype that mirrors the look and feel of the actual product, enabling teams to visualize and test new features seamlessly.
Ensuring Brand and Design Consistency
Claire brings up a critical challenge: ensuring that AI-generated prototypes align with a company’s unique brand and design patterns. Colin acknowledges that while achieving pixel-perfect replicas can be challenging, the goal is to maintain enough visual consistency to reflect the brand accurately without getting bogged down in minor discrepancies.
Colin Matthews [08:44]: "Typically not pixel perfect, it is still a little challenging... The goal is to represent the product in a way that doesn’t make people feel like you’re talking about a different topic."
This balance allows teams to communicate new ideas effectively without the distraction of inconsistent UI elements.
Advanced Tools and Features
Beyond his primary tool, Colin introduces another AI prototyping solution called Magic Patterns. He praises the tool’s design-centric approach and its ability to create more refined components with less manual prompting.
Colin Matthews [11:54]: "There's one other tool that I am currently in love with, which is Magic Patterns... They've built something really special here, I think."
He demonstrates how Magic Patterns automates the assembly of UI components, further enhancing the efficiency and quality of prototypes.
Versioning and Forking Prototypes
A significant advantage of using AI-driven prototyping tools is the ability to manage versions and create forks. Colin explains how these features allow teams to experiment with different design variations without altering the original component library.
Colin Matthews [11:07]: "Using forks allows us to create copies of projects without making changes to the component library, maintaining the integrity of our base design."
This capability facilitates collaborative experimentation and iterative design, essential for refining product features.
Integrating AI Prototyping in Teams
Addressing team dynamics, Colin emphasizes the importance of empathy and collaboration when introducing AI prototyping tools. He advises against expecting designers to merely "clean up" AI-generated prototypes, advocating instead for a team-wide approach where everyone can contribute ideas and iteratively enhance prototypes.
Colin Matthews [25:37]: "It's just about enabling people to do their jobs faster, better, and being a little bit more inclusive with the set of people who can communicate their ideas effectively."
This inclusive strategy fosters a more dynamic and innovative product development environment.
Structured vs. Freeform Prototyping Approaches
When discussing prototyping methodologies, Colin admits his preference for a structured approach over a freeform, reactive one. He shares his experience of maintaining organized prompt libraries and component structures to minimize errors and streamline the prototyping workflow.
Clarie Vo [26:54]: "You are a very structured prototyper... I want to just go where the LLM takes me, ride the wave of the tokens, generate what we will."
Colin Matthews [27:13]: "I'm very structured in how I approach it... I spend less time debugging and more time developing actual features."
This disciplined approach contrasts with more spontaneous methods, highlighting the benefits of organization in achieving reliable and high-quality prototypes.
Handling AI Errors and Challenges
A common challenge with AI tools is managing unexpected elements within prototypes. Colin shares his strategy for addressing such issues, which involves prompting the AI to explain anomalies before requesting specific corrections.
Colin Matthews [28:53]: "My most common prompt is 'Explain to me why this is happening. Don’t write any code.'"
This methodical troubleshooting ensures that AI behaves as intended without introducing negative interactions or unwanted artifacts into the prototype.
Resources and Further Learning
Towards the end of the episode, Colin provides listeners with resources to deepen their understanding of AI prototyping:
This guidance equips listeners with actionable steps to implement AI-driven prototyping within their own teams and projects.
Conclusion
In this insightful episode, Claire Vo and Colin Matthews explore the potent combination of AI and prototyping, illustrating how modern tools can revolutionize product development. By leveraging component libraries, structured methodologies, and collaborative strategies, teams can create highly consistent and brand-aligned prototypes with unprecedented efficiency. Colin’s expertise provides valuable takeaways for product managers, designers, and anyone interested in harnessing AI to enhance their workflow.
Notable Quotes:
Claire Vo [00:20]: "You used to have to know how to code or get really good at Figma. And now we have unleashed the product manager with these chat-based prototyping tools."
Colin Matthews [03:41]: "The concept here is actually pretty simple, coming kind of from the design world of having a component library."
Colin Matthews [08:44]: "Typically not pixel perfect, it is still a little challenging... The goal is to represent the product in a way that doesn’t make people feel like you’re talking about a different topic."
Claire Vo [26:54]: "You are a very structured prototyper... I want to just go where the LLM takes me, ride the wave of the tokens, generate what we will."
Colin Matthews [28:53]: "My most common prompt is 'Explain to me why this is happening. Don’t write any code.'"
Connect with Colin Matthews:
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