My ‘Un-Loveable’ Experience
Let us explore the hype.
We are using AI tools in some form or fashion to increase our efficiency and the way we are delivering work is changing. It is tempting to allow AI to take the wheel and to sit back and to let it do all the thinking. Good news is that AI cannot function without you and your thinking. In my recent experience I got my hands dirty (muddy in fact) with Loveable. A well talked about tool now, perceived for its benefits and replacement of developers.
My experience was that the tool was able to in a very short space of time (seconds) populate multiple styled pages with data relevant to the application I had guided it to set up. The initial upfront value saved me 2 weeks to a month in terms of the levels it populated in such a short time. Where I ran into challenges was the tools inability to save logic, rules and guidance set up. This resulted in a lot of time being spent on tweaking and re-enforcing these rules and logic. The tool becomes exasperating in that after many attempts to process the same action, it failed. The result was that I ran into an excess of 200 credits, which is around R4000.
I became very frustrated as I was not able to get the tool to respond to what I felt were simple instructions.
So, where is the gap?
Ideally, we would use this tool to enable quick mock-ups for our client, but it is by no means the final product or solution. The value we add into the process is the strategic thinking, interactions and rules which the system cannot do on its own. We are looking into moving these high-level screens into a tool like Figma and using our internal process which create high levels of efficiency around the handover between design and development.
We have become masters in this piece of the delivery cycle. What this means for our clients is that with a reduction in development time comes an increased time upfront, understanding the problem. The problem-solving aspect and ensuring we are designing for the right customer pain points. We find that while tools can provide some high-level insights, we always prefer the quality of speaking to customers and gathering ‘real’ insights. Tools like ‘ChatGPT’ and ‘Co-Pilot’ help us conduct SWOT Analysis and produce high level user journeys but ultimately the trick is the ability to move this into editable formats to add our craft and experience to the delivery.
If you would like to speed up the delivery of your projects, chat to us!