Blog — Roy Villasana

Articles on UX design, AI product experiences, and design systems.

"Vibe design" is a real thing now — here's why that name should worry you

Category: AI & Design · Tags: AI, Design Tools, Google Stitch, Vibe Design, Design Education, Junior Designers, Craft, UX, Opinion · Read time: 8 min

Google just shipped "vibe design" — AI handles the spacing, the nesting, the layout logic while you focus on intent. After 16 years in the field, I'm not worried about the tool. I'm worried about what we lose when we name the craft something you're not supposed to think about.

GPTs vs. Projects: How to Build an AI Workspace That Actually Knows Your Work

Category: AI & Design · Tags: AI, ChatGPT, GPTs, Projects, AI workflow, product design, UX, productivity · Read time: 5 min

Most people use AI like a blank chat window — re-explaining context every single session. Here's the architectural fix: how Projects and GPTs work together to create an AI that actually knows your work.

Trust Is Now a Core UX Problem (And Designers Have Been Sleeping On It)

Category: AI & Design · Tags: UX, AI, trust, product design, transparency, explainability, design strategy · Read time: 6 min

We've built smarter AI systems, and users trust them less. Here's why trust is the design constraint we keep deferring — and what the teams actually getting it right are doing differently.

The Design Tool That Isn't a Design Tool: What Noon Actually Gets Right

Category: Design Tools · Tags: design tools, Noon, Figma, design handoff, design systems, UX, design-to-code · Read time: 7 min

Noon just raised $44M to eliminate the gap between design and code. Here's what they're actually proposing — and why it matters more than the headline suggests.

Claude Design: A Bold Step Forward — But Pencil.dev Still Has the Edge

Category: AI-driven Design · Tags: AI Design, Claude AI, Pencil.dev, Design Tools, Figma, Design Systems, Opinion · Read time: 7 min

Anthropic's Claude Design brings AI-assisted design system creation and Figma-referenced prototyping to the Claude ecosystem. Here's my honest take on where it shines, where it falls short, and why I'm still reaching for Pencil.dev first.

Figma Weave Is Real — And It Changes What It Means to Be a Design Systems Designer

Category: Design Systems · Tags: design systems, Figma, Figma Weave, AI tools, design ops, workflow automation · Read time: 7 min

Figma Weave Workflows encodes design system knowledge as executable processes — not documents. Here's what that shift means for the design systems role, and what to watch out for.

I Built a Video Game With My 5-Year-Old Daughter — And AI Was Our Studio

Category: Personal · Tags: parenting, game development, AI tools, side project, fatherhood, indie game · Read time: 6 min

A story about parental guilt, a 5-year-old game director, zombie plants, and building something real together using AI tools — in three days.

I Use Claude Code Like Doctor Strange. Here's Why Most Designers Are Doing AI Wrong.

Category: AI-driven Design · Tags: AI-driven Design, Claude Code, Workflow, MCP, Prompt Engineering, Design Process · Read time: 10 min

Most designers use AI as a glorified search engine. I use it as a system with 8 arms. The difference is not the tool — it's the process. And that process is what survives when the tools change.

How I Cut AI Prototyping Costs by 97% with a Structured Prompt Skill

Category: AI-driven Design · Tags: AI-driven Design, Figma, Prototyping, Open Source, Prompt Engineering, Figma Make · Read time: 8 min

Most designers using AI prototyping tools are burning tokens on the wrong thing. This is an open source Claude Code skill that converts a Figma link into a structured prompt before it reaches any AI — and the efficiency gains are significant.

How to Make LLMs Recommend You: Structured Data, JSON-LD, and the New SEO

Category: AI-driven Design · Tags: AI-driven Design, SEO, Structured Data, LLM, JSON-LD · Read time: 9 min

Search engine optimization as we knew it is no longer enough. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity for a senior product designer, the answer does not come from a keyword ranking — it comes from structured knowledge that was crawled, parsed, and understood. Here is the exact process I used to make my portfolio readable by AI systems.

The Role After Senior Designer: What You Need to Become and How to Get There

Category: UX Research · Tags: UX Research, Design Leadership, Career Development, AI-driven Design · Read time: 10 min

The UX career ladder is not getting harder to climb — it is changing shape. The designers who will matter in five years are not the ones who got better at designing. They are the ones who understood which direction to grow toward before the industry made it obvious.

How AI-generated users can accelerate UX discovery without replacing real research

Category: Ai, Research, AI-Research · Tags: · Read time: 8 min

For decades, user-centered design has been built on a simple principle: Product decisions should be informed by real users. That principle remains true today. However, the context of digital product development has changed dramatically. Product teams iterate faster than ever, generating new ideas and hypotheses continuously, while the time required to conduct traditional user research often becomes a constraint. In this environment, new tools are emerging that allow teams to explore hypotheses before conducting formal research. One of the most promising approaches is the use of AI-driven synthetic users. But there is a critical condition that is often overlooked: Synthetic users only provide value when they are grounded in real data. Without empirical data about the target population, synthetic simulations are nothing more than speculation.

Make Your Website AI-Friendly (AEO/GEO) Without Rebuilding Your Tech Stack

Category: AI, LLM, SEO, AEO, GEO · Tags: AEO, SEO, LLM, AI, Claude Code, ChatGPT< Gemini · Read time: 5 min

Search is changing faster than at any point in the last 20 years. Traditional SEO focused on ranking pages in search results. But today, AI systems are increasingly the interface between users and the web. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI-powered search engines are retrieving information directly from websites and synthesizing answers. If your site isn’t structured in a way that these systems can easily understand, your content may never appear in AI-generated answers — even if it ranks well in traditional search. This is where AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) come in.

Everyone wants to hire seniors. Nobody wants to make them.

Category: UX Research · Tags: UX Research, Design Systems, Visual Craft · Read time: 9 min

I became a senior designer the slow way — through repetition, feedback, failure, and time. Looking at the current hiring market, I wonder how many of the junior designers working today will have the same opportunity. The conditions that made me are disappearing.

Dancing in the clouds with Copilot and Claude

Category: UX + Code · Tags: UX + Code, AI-driven Design, Design Systems · Read time: 8 min

I have been coding since before I was a designer. When AI coding assistants arrived, I was skeptical. After eighteen months of daily use, I have changed my mind — but not in the way I expected.

The AI adoption theatre: When innovation becomes performance

Category: AI-driven Design · Tags: AI-driven Design, UX Research, Design Systems · Read time: 7 min

After years working at the intersection of business, UX, and technology, I have learned to recognize a familiar pattern: organizations adopting AI not to solve real problems, but to be seen solving them. Here is what that looks like from the inside.

Design Systems × AI: Scaling Token Architecture for Intelligent Products

Category: Design Systems · Tags: Design Systems, AI-driven Design · Read time: 7 min

Design systems built on semantic token architectures have a structural advantage in the AI era: tokens give AI tools the machine-readable design intent they need to make meaningful contributions. Here is how to build for it.

Prompt Design Is a UX Discipline: Writing Interfaces for AI

Category: AI-driven Design · Tags: AI-driven Design, UX + Code · Read time: 8 min

When AI is the interface, the quality of prompts — system instructions, conversational scaffolding, error language — determines the quality of the experience. This is UX work, not engineering work. Here is how to treat it that way.

Heuristic Evaluation in the Age of AI: Nielsen's 2026 Roundup

Category: UX Research · Tags: UX Research, AI-driven Design · Read time: 6 min

Jakob Nielsen's February 2026 UX Roundup examines how heuristic evaluation is evolving as AI enters both the products we evaluate and the evaluation process itself. The findings reshape how we think about usability standards in AI products.

Evident: A New Human-Centered, AI-Assisted UX Design Methodology

Category: UX Research · Tags: UX Research, AI-driven Design · Read time: 7 min

A UX team has launched Evident — a structured methodology that defines exactly where AI tools should participate in the design process and where they should not. Here is how it works and why teams need a framework like this now.

Apple Study: Users Want Transparent AI Agents, Not Black Boxes

Category: UX Research · Tags: UX Research, AI-driven Design · Read time: 6 min

An Apple-associated study found that users consistently prefer AI agents that explain their actions over more capable systems that operate opaquely — even when the transparent system is slower. The findings have direct implications for how we design AI features.

Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2026: What AI-First Hardware Means for UX

Category: AI-driven Design · Tags: AI-driven Design, UX + Code · Read time: 5 min

Samsung's February 2026 Galaxy Unpacked positions its entire device line around AI. For product designers, this shift from feature-centric to intelligence-centric hardware creates both new interaction challenges and real design opportunities.

UserTesting Goes Inside Figma: What the AI Plugin Means for Designers

Category: AI-driven Design · Tags: AI-driven Design, UX Research, Wireframing · Read time: 5 min

UserTesting launched an AI-powered plugin that lets teams run user tests directly from Figma prototypes. Here is what it does, what it cannot replace, and how it changes the research workflow for product designers.

AI in Qualitative Research: Faster Insights, Same Human Judgment

Category: UX Research · Tags: UX Research, AI-driven Design · Read time: 6 min

AI tools for transcription and thematic analysis are accelerating qualitative UX research. But the judgment calls that make research meaningful still require a human researcher — and that is a feature, not a bug.

Trust Is the New Usability: Designing AI Experiences in 2026

Category: AI-driven Design · Tags: AI-driven Design, UX Research · Read time: 7 min

NN/g's 2026 State of UX report identifies trust as the central design challenge of AI-powered products. Here is what calibrated trust means in practice — and three principles every AI product designer should apply now.