What remains for designers as mockup work shrinks
1. The persuasive role of mockups shifts to prototypes
Jenny Wen explains that mockups and prototyping once took 60–70% of her work time, while mockup creation now accounts for roughly 30–40%.
- This is a personal change rather than an industry-wide statistic, but it offers a concrete example of what has shrunk.
- As AI makes working prototypes faster to build, hands-on experience becomes a basis for decisions ahead of polished mockups.
- The author interprets this as prototypes taking over the mockup’s role of persuading others that a product should be built.
- AI products with varying outputs also expose the limits of drawing every state in advance.
2. Two roles fill the time freed up
The center of design work shifts toward refining implementations together and setting the team’s direction.
- Judgment during execution: Designers review implementations with engineers and decide what to ship, merge, or discard.
- This role protects usability and product coherence amid rapidly multiplying outputs.
- Setting direction: Prototypes looking three to six months ahead help teams make choices in place of long-term vision documents.
- Something people can use and challenge reveals sooner whether the direction holds up.
3. Making things maintains the sensibility behind judgment
The author distinguishes AI’s ability to produce competent design from the ability to make choices a particular product needs.
- Contextual choices: In his view, even an attractive result requires a separate judgment about whether it suits this company, audience, and moment.
- Maintaining sensibility through making: Comparing alternatives side by side and refining interaction details in Figma remain valuable.
- His concern is that losing time spent making things can also weaken the eye that reviews results.
- The smaller share of production time can be treated as practice that sustains judgment, rather than simply leftover work.
