Jenny Wen, Head of Design for Claude at Anthropic, discusses the workflow challenges of engineers using AI coding assistants without full design system adherence.
Opinion
Jenny Wen: The traditional research-and-diverge design process is dead
“This design process that designers have been taught where you go and you go off and you do a bunch of research and discovery, and then you like diverge, you converge, diverge, converge. And it's like this process that we sort of treated as gospel and tried so …”
Insight
Wen: AI compresses product design vision horizons to 3 to 6 months
“We used to go off and say, you know, we're gonna do this design vision. We're gonna go off and make this like two year, five year, whatever, 10 year vision even. And we're gonna like point us towards something. But the way that the technology is changing now, …”
Insight
Wen: Clickable mocks fail for non-deterministic AI; teams must test live models
“You can't, you just can't, we can't mock up all the states, you know, and you can't theorize and you can't even make like a clickable prototype where that you sort of have to use the actual models underneath and you have to sort of see people try it out with t…”
Insight
Wen: Design time spent mocking dropped from 70% to 35% with AI
“I think as a designer a few years ago, I would say, like, maybe 60 to 70% of it was, like, mocking and prototyping stuff up, and then spending, you know, the last 20 years, some of the last 20 or so, like, doing the sort of, like, jamming with engineers, consu…”
Opinion
Wen: Claude is not yet hireable as a product designer
“I don't think Claude is there yet. I don't think Claude is there yet in terms of a designer you would hire. I think it is not yet the strong generalist or the deep specialist. Or the crack new grad. I think it's pretty good at a first pass and at presenting a …”
Insight
Wen: AI coding tools are too linear for early design exploration
“Right now coding or right now working with some of these coding tools doesn't lend itself super well to that because it's super linear. You could super invest in one direction and you just iterate with a lot on them, for example.”