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🎨 Do solo makers need a UI/UX designer?

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For solo makers, wearing every hat is almost unavoidable - developer, marketer, support, product… and often designer too.

AI makes this even easier now. You can generate UI pretty quickly, but a lot of products end up relying on consistent, polished AI-generated solutions rather than something truly unique or thoughtfully designed for their specific product.

So I’m curious:

Do you design the UI/UX yourself when building solo?

Or do you think bringing in a designer (even for a few key screens) is worth it?

And if you’re using AI for design, do you feel it’s enough to get you to a good product experience?

Would love to hear how other makers approach it.

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AI gets me a solution in 30 minutes. Making it usable and not look like every other app takes a week and hundreds of screenshot annotations. Capture, mark what is wrong, send it back. Words do not land for spacing and hierarchy, pointing does. 20 years in UX is the only reason I see what is wrong in the first version.

 How I understand you! =/

To be honest, I prefer spending time prototyping my own design rather than putting all that energy and effort into trying to explain exactly what I want to AI.

I guess the problem in both my and your case (and designers in general) is that we already know exactly what we'd like to see! =D
That's why we can sometimes spend even more time trying to explain what we want to AI than more technical makers do.

I shipped my first product with zero design thinking and paid the price in churn.

AI tools are incredible for getting to "good enough" fast — but I've noticed they optimize for familiar, not right. Every AI-generated UI starts looking like everything else, and users can feel that even if they can't name it.

What worked for me: a single 2-hour session with a designer friend, not to build screens, but to roast my user flow. That one conversation was worth more than weeks of iterating on Figma/AI.

So my take: you don't need a designer on payroll. You need a designer's eye at least once before launch.

 Designers are extremely good at roasting! =DDD

But I know how much it can help open up new perspectives and reveal possibilities you hadn’t considered before.

 Haha exactly — it's basically a feature, not a bug at this point 😄

And that's the thing most people miss: the roast is the value. A good designer doesn't just tell you what looks bad, they surface assumptions you didn't even know you were making.

Half the time it's not "your button color is wrong" — it's "why does this step even exist?"

Those questions are worth gold.

 Yes, the ability to understand real-world work experience is what transforms a designer into a UI/UX designer.

I think AI has made UI much easier to get right, but UX is a different story. Understanding how people actually move through a product, what gets their attention, where they drop off, and what keeps them engaged is still very human.

I would not hire a designer by default today, but I also would not let AI decide the direction for me. I use it heavily for speed, exploration and iteration, but I still want control over the flow and the reasoning behind it.

 You know, I think developers hit the jackpot when they have a designer’s eye and that feeling for what works.

I guess if you can judge what works and make your own UX decisions, you already have that =)

What are you building?

  Fair point.

I work across UI/UX, design, and 3D, with most of my background as 3D generalist.
Right now I’m part of a small team building something around turning ideas into real products, making innovation available for everyone. Still keeping a few things under wraps, but we’ll have more to share very soon.

 Oh, really?
I'm more than 12 years in animation production, our product was born right there.

So I wonder why I hadn't you in my LinkedIn contacts! =D Connecting.. and waiting for news from your product soon!

 Haha, that’s on me. I’ve always been pretty bad at the digital/networking side of things, but I’m trying to change that now.

Nice to hear we’re in familiar waters though. I’ll definitely check out your product too. Glad we connected!

AI can definitely get a solo maker to a good-looking UI much faster. But “good-looking” and “good product experience” are very different things.

I’ve been experimenting with AI-assisted product design myself, and I see AI as an excellent design accelerator—not a replacement for product judgment. The real challenge is understanding users, context, edge cases, hierarchy, and making decisions that are right for that specific product.

I’d bring a designer in when those decisions start becoming critical to the product’s success.

 I think some problems never reach a critical stage if a designer is involved from the very beginning.
(I’m saying this purely from a designer’s perspective, haha =D)

As a founder, I’ve found AI is great for getting from idea to a solid first UI fast. But real users still expose UX problems no prompt will catch. The challenge is knowing when to stop polishing and start putting the product in front of people.

 Yes, that’s the most modern approach today.

And how do you solve this problem in your team? Did shipping the product help shape a clearer UX?

 Yes, definitely. Shipping helped a lot. Once real users started using the product, we quickly saw where our assumptions didn’t match how people actually used it. That feedback shaped the UX much more than polishing it internally.

 But do you polish that internally with the help of UI UX designer?

I design the UI myself, but I rely a lot on users. Much of it just needs small polishing, and they show me where: they ask where to find a feature, or get stuck on a setting. Often the fix is to hide or disable what doesn't apply right now, and explain why. For me the risk with AI UI isn't that it looks bad, it's that it looks like everyone else's. Good UX comes from real use and real users. Sometimes I do use AI for ideas on how to put something together.

 Using AI is definitely part of today’s workflows. But you’re right - it’s great for getting ideas on how to put some parts together.

And I agree with relying on user feedback when you design the UI yourself. What you're building now?

 Yeah, ideas is where it earns its place. The parts that matter still come from watching someone get stuck.
Right now I'm building a screen recorder and editor for Windows. Most of this week has been the unglamorous half: timing and performance. AI is good there too, until we both start hallucinating 🤣. Mostly it's the kind of thing nobody notices when it's right.
What are you working on?

 Very well said “nobody notices when it’s right” =D

We’re working on RunEvr - an agentic environment for creative teams.

It was born in our own animation studio, where we needed better tools to be more productive.

 That's really where the best tools come from, when you know exactly what's needed. You end up fixing the small annoyances nobody else would bother with, because you hit them every day.

I think solo makers can go pretty far without a dedicated UI/UX designer nowadays.

There are really good design systems, templates and of course AI can help a lot.

But from my Quality Assurance experience, I think the main issues continue to be how AI keeps messing ideas and do a lot of overengineering. Even with specific isntructions to not do so.
I find my self debugging a lot of flows that does not make much sense and bugs that only a Human with an actual brain could have found it, to be honest.

So:

  1. Do you design the UI/UX yourself when building solo? 100%.

    I love the freedom I now have to put all my ideas down on "paper" by myself.

  2. Or do you think bringing in a designer (even for a few key screens) is worth it?

    I thought about it and even talked with a friend of mine who's a Product Designer. It was a real eye-opener ahah. The amount of confidence I had from building everything by myself and feeling proud of it was very different from actually questioning the purpose behind everything I had been building.

  3. And if you’re using AI for design, do you feel it’s enough to get you to a good product experience?

    100%. I've been learning so much just by trying, failing, and, more importantly, iterating through every phase. The area where I still feel I lack the most is UX. I don't think it's as straightforward, and I feel like AI still struggles quite a lot there. Maybe because it requires actual research, human judgment, understanding users, and so on. But looking back 1–2 years at how I've been using AI, I've learned so much without actually being a "Product Designer" or a UI/UX expert.

 Thanks for sharing your experience!

I always say the same thing: if a maker has a designer’s eye, they notice the details and can build almost everything on their own.

And it’s interesting to hear that you’re a QA, but also building your own product.

What’s it about?

Are you planning to launch it here on PH?

 100% agree with you on that. In the past, I took a web designer course that gave me enough foundation to understand both basic and some more advanced UI/UX principles. I feel like that helps me a lot these days too.
It’s also fun and interesting to see how AI is clearly smarter than me in many ways, no doubt about it, but still can’t always produce the result I’m looking for. My conversations with AI still often end with me pointing something out and “it” saying, “You’re right, let me fix that...”. In the testing area I feel like there's still a long road to achieve. And I feel like this goes back to the main problem you raise on this post :D

About my own product, yeah, I’m planning to do that here soon if things go well.

 Great ! Connected on Linkedin. If you have any questions related to your launch I can share my own experience with pleasure. Good luck =)

hey :) I went ahead and launch my own product now. Would love a feedback from someone from Design area and expertise like you Adana :) link:

I'd run as far away as possible from AI for the actual build or copywriting because it all looks the same.

A copywriter and a designer have the power to make your website and, by extension, your business stand out, so I think they're worth it.

The alternative is to build enough expertise in these areas so that even if you do use AI, you have the knowledge and skills to see when something is lousy and put it right.

 Agree. That’s why I always say that AI in the hands of a designer can create magic.

I design Top10Q myself. AI gave me a clean first pass, but it left a “show the rest” link under the daily 10, and a beta user tapped it every morning — which quietly killed the cap. I only caught it by watching one session, then deleted the link.

 Oh =) Interesting case.

Are you planning to launch your product here?

  Yes — Top10Q is on PH as pre-launch now. I am waiting to schedule launch day until a couple more beta users trust the daily reset; I will post here when I pick a date.

 looking forward to your launch day=)

Feel free to send me your product's draf page, I'll share my experience with pleasure!

@adana That means a lot — thank you. I am not ready to send the draft page yet (still fixing the daily-reset edge case a beta user caught). When it is stable I will drop the Top10Q pre-launch link here and would really value your eyes on the first-run flow.

 good luck ! =)

 thank you

A focused review of signup and the main task would be worth more to me than a full visual redesign

Especially the empty states and what happens when something fails

 For me, when I hear “designer,” the first thing I think they should focus on is the experience first, and then the visual design.

So in your case, do you design your product's UI/UX yourself?

yes, doing it myself, iterating and constantly improving

 Good luck with it !

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