A guide to AI prototyping for product designers

AI is more than a product; it’s a platform that will change how and what we design — and who gets involved.

Prototyping with AI.

At Config 2023 (Figma’s annual conference), Noah Levin, VP of Design at Figma, introduced the concept of the Ceiling and Floor in product design and predicted the role of AI in design.

Noah defined the Ceiling and Floor as follows:

• Floor: There’s a minimum skill required to participate in design. It takes years of training, practice, and self-learning to become a designer.
• Ceiling: There’s a limit on how good you can be at designing and influencing a product — even the best designers often struggle to bring their ideas to life without engineering help.

The Ceiling and Floor in product design — by Noah Levin (Source).

Noah then predicted the role of AI in design is to shift both the floor and the ceiling. It’s lowering the floor — allowing more people to create, prototype, and ship ideas faster than ever. And it’s raising the ceiling — giving designers superpowers to develop, iterate, and push the limits of creativity.

Fast forward to 2025, and his prediction has already become a reality — perhaps even sooner than he expected (otherwise, Figma might have released something similar to V0, Lovable, or Framer by now).

The double-diamond process is evolving into a “reverse” double-diamond— where companies ship first and refine the design later. Linear’s CEO recently shared that his team builds features by first shipping a “draft version” within a week. Only after validating it do they invest more time in improving and refining it — so that they don’t waste time shipping unnecessary features.

The “Reverse Double Diamond” concept (Source).

A recent viral tweet from Paul Graham also shows that there are already teams replacing Figma with Replit, an AI-powered tool for building applications — to quicken the prototyping process.