Stop designing like 5 years ago
Design evolution was never just about the tools, but about how we think, build, and learn with them.
When I started in design back in 2013, I used Adobe Photoshop to design websites and Adobe Acrobat to build interactive prototypes.
We were just photoshopping screenshots.
Then came Sketch and InVision, a new era of collaboration and chaos. Every project folder had at least one final_version.sketch, which was never actually final.
Then came Figma. Everything centralized: design, feedback, handoff, collaboration. It felt like the future.
But after a decade of debating which tools to use, I’ve realized something: it was never really about the tools.
The illusion of faster tools
Every new design tool promised speed and efficiency. For a while, that was true. But if you look at today’s teams moving the fastest, they’re not the ones following the traditional process:
Research
Ideation
Low-fi wireframes
High-fi design
Prototype
Validate
Repeat (until deadlines kill your optimism)
This model worked for years, but now it’s slow, rigid, and expensive.
A new workflow for AI-native designers
Today, tools like Lovable, v0, Bolt, Cursor, Base44, Figma Make, or MagicPath are reshaping how we work.
They take you from idea to working prototype in hours, even sometimes straight into production.
That forces a new kind of workflow:
Research: Understand the problem deeply.
Ideation: Shape potential solutions.
Prompt & Prototype: Describe your solution through prompts and let AI tools build it iteratively.
Validate: Test a real and interactive prototype with users and refine through new prompts.
Faster prototyping and validation
With AI tools, you no longer spend days pushing pixels or updating prototypes after every round of feedback.
You describe the new idea, or simply type the feedback, and a new version is ready in minutes.
And more importantly, the prototype evolves into a living product to test real flows, explore failure states, and rethink user paths.
No more guided prototypes where a wrong click gives you a blue box telling you where to go next.
This is where design becomes exciting again. Once the concept is validated and flows are clear, you can focus on what truly makes experiences memorable: micro-interactions, motion, and emotional resonance.
That’s the real shift, from designing screens to designing systems of behavior and emotion.
The real role of designers
Don’t panic. AI won’t replace us; it’ll replace the old way of designing.
AI can remix the past, but it can’t sense what people feel or imagine what doesn’t exist yet. That’s our job.
But if we spend all our time on operative tasks instead of exploring, validating, and crafting meaningful experiences, we’ll make ourselves irrelevant.
How are we doing it at Factorial?
A few months ago, our design team started using Lovable and Figma Make daily.
What used to take weeks now takes days, sometimes hours.
That shift has freed us to explore more ideas in parallel, validate them faster, and focus on the fine details that elevate the entire experience.
We didn’t replace Figma; we redefined its role:
Lovable: builds early concepts in minutes, perfect for fresh ideas.
Figma Make: creates more realistic prototypes once the direction is clear or components are ready.
Figma: remains where we refine edge cases, error flows, and polish the system.
AI hasn’t replaced our process or our role. It’s expanded what we’re capable of.
Conclusion
The old design process was built for static tools.
This new one is built for living systems.
We’re not losing design, we’re losing the illusion that design only happens inside a canvas.
AI lets us return to what matters: solving real problems and crafting experiences that feel effortless, memorable, and deeply human.