Tool vs. Process with Guest Charles Forman

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Before we start the episode.

I wanted to let you know this is an edited version of an AI design tool design session I had with my special guest Charles Foreman.

You can watch the full hour, along with our screen share on YouTube @thedailysprintbroadcast.

Watch or listen, but please subscribe.

Alright, here we go.

Welcome to the Daily Sprint, where today is the only day you have to design.

Today I've got a guest and seasoned designer Charles Foreman with me.

We'll be kicking the tires out a few gin AI tools for the purpose of seeing whether they help, hinder, or hide critical parts of the design process.

I'm Daryl Esterbrook 30 years into UX product design.

Yes, that may be old but not nearly as old as the design process itself.

I'm also the founder of designing a platform for product designers who want to design with a why.

Find out more and get on board with a free newsletter at designy.com

So welcome.

This is episode 15.

And I have no quippy saying for that.

It's just good to be here.

Glad you're here.

Introduce my guest.

Arles, I want to ask to the audience, what is?

What are your thoughts on AI, right?

Is your head spinning with all these AI tools out there and have you tried them?

And more importantly, where is it going with the design process?

So, I'm going to welcome to the daily sprint, Charles Foreman.

He's been a designer for over 20 years, from traditional graphic design to digital product design.

He's worked in startups and agencies, corporate environments.

We've worked together.

So we've, we go back ways.

And now he's exploring ways to help small businesses tell their stories online.

He's a founder of Explmore, community driven adventure, lifestyle brand.

You can find out more at exploremore.com.

We'll put that in the comments.

And he goes by the name of Overland Designer, and you can email him at OverlandDesigner@gmail.com, if you want to say hi, or work with him and collaborate together.

So hi Charles, how are you?

Hi, I'm good.

Thanks for having me.

Glad you're here.

This is awesome.

So tell me a little bit more about the Overland designer, because that's interesting.

And if you can explore more.

Um, yeah, so as you said, I'm the founder of Explore More, which is a community driven adventure lifestyle brand. Where I encourage people to venture out into the world and do travel, um, under the term of overlanding, uh, which has become a trendy hashtag.

It was founded on the story before that hashtag of my parents who did a trip in 1977.

Um, and they wrote a book about it and then, uh, to help them market it.

I created the brand, explore more.

Um, and that's kind of guided me into this industry further and so much so that, um, I try and help other overland businesses, uh, market to their customers.

So that's where the Overland designer comes in.

Um, but I've also starting to explore other interests of mine to help other small businesses, um, get a good online presence and, uh, Most mostly like a refresh of their dated website and then using tools to kind of enhance that and bring them up to sort of today's world.

There are a lot of tools.

So here we go, right?

It's been, so like, given your design background, because you've done branding, like, big branding and just that sort of level of design where you're thinking holistic system and things like that and then product design, like those 2 things coming together. For so long and before we've had these generative tools.

With all of these coming out.

How is that impacting your design process, what are your thoughts on?

Biggest impact that I'm seeing at the moment is the obvious that it like just speeds up.

Uh, all the little jobs in between.

For example, like creating like a site map or something like that, even down to the detail of you might create the elements that help you create that site map to visually show a customer or a client or whatever.

With uh, with tools now, AI, it just does it for you and it takes out that's hours of unnecessary, uh, you know, need to build those things.

Um, and that just in turn helps speed up the process of getting a project done.

Um, But taking it with a grain of like skepticism that it's not perfect.

And you still need a trained eye to kind of make sure that it's doing the outcome that you want it to do.

That's the trick.

I think the the eye for design.

There is an eye in design, so that works out. That you're trying to discern what's generating the process and what's actually generating the content in the process.

And I think that's where it's really blurred.

Because as designers were able to synthesize so many things visually.

And now we've got these tools that aren't just executing commands, but they could actually create the content, like you said, of the site map.

And so then the question is, where is it getting that information and how is it relevant to this particular client?

So what are you looking to get out of our exploration today?

Because we're going to kick some tires?

I'm hoping from this to learn some other tools that you have.

Uh, to help with the process.

We'll see what happens.

Yeah, so you're going to look at reloom.

Which I hadn't heard of until you had mentioned it.

Um, so that's, hey, what, what haven't we heard of?

I mean there's probably like an iceberg's worth of AI tools.

And then Google Stitch, that's come out recently.

And then, um, clawed design, even maybe even more recently.

Kind of, I asked you to kind of come up with a, um, like a prompt or at least a basis of something that we're going to kind of do together simultaneously, I'm going to share the screen.

All right, so let's see.

So what's the general premise or prompt before we switch over to tools?

We've got it broken out into company description, um, which in this case, it's movement, um, being a cutting edge training facility based in Sydney, Australia, designed to, uh, for high performance athletes, and aspiring to reach peak physical condition.

Um, And then the goals, uh, which we've also included are to encourage new members to join. 2nd to that is to drive downloads of the app.

Um, and then, uh, lastly on that is adding additional relevant notes just to make sure that whatever your whatever tool you're using is going to include uh, specifics.

So are you familiar with Reloom in a bit to know where to start?

Yeah, I've played around with it quite a bit and they have some really good YouTube videos that give a nice overview.

But essentially, as you can see at the top, it takes you from putting a description for the project, and then it will populate a site map for you, and then you go across the top tabs to continue that build.

Um, So yeah, I've done it a couple times.

And we'll see what happens.

And in stitch here, it's uh, they've got a native mobile app and web.

I'll just go for a mobile app.

I'm going to paste in this description. That you had for us.

If you had a client approach, if movement came to you.

And they're like, Charles, help us.

That's why.

And you got this.

Would you have gotten this kind of description or prompt from an initial meeting or what else would you do generally before you started creating a site map?

Yeah, I think it's that discovery at the beginning when you meet the client and you want to download all that you can from them directly.

Understanding what their goals are, what their what their brand message is, um, what they're aiming to achieve with any new website refresh, um, because a lot of them already have a site presence.

They've got content, they've got stuff, but, um, it may not be serving them the best way they can, uh, both like design aesthetically, like it doesn't represent their brand as much as as it could for the service that they provide.

And, um, also equally, for like cafe example or something, uh, the information that's important for search engines and things like that, of opening times and menu items and contact details. Are also important to highlight further up. On the site.

So I would make sure that I got those details from them in order to populate this.

So this will be interesting because in one sense, we haven't had that conversation, right?

So we don't have all those details.

We can assume that we do, but in one sense, this is might be the interface of some of these small business owners trying to do, you know, trying to use AI to create their own site. Like hey, I want to refresh it.

So they're just going to go in and type, pretty much what you said, right, you know, what we've got here.

Okay, so interesting.

Yeah, I just want to see where you go.

So, launch.

I'll see what happens here in in Stitch.

But I'll hit generate site map, which is the first.

Well, that's pretty speedy.

Like you didn't even have...

Yeah, that was very quick.

You literally didn't have anything to processing.

Meanwhile, over here on Claude, it seems I've hit a limit, which is so funny, because this is now over the weekend.

Since I was playing with it a little bit.

But I think that's a real issue with AI in general, the cost involved in using it.

Whereas on your, let's Google, this is, so we'll just focus on Google Stitch then, since we got clawed designs out of the, out of commission for this one.

But let's look at yours.

What did it?

Because that was pretty instant.

What did it bring us?

Yeah, so it, it populated a, um, site map starting with a homepage.

And I think my understanding is you can, for like testimonial section, you can make it a global, um, asset.

Oh, interesting.

I think.

Yeah, so it's kind of like you're building components of the page, so to speak, and wherever you want a testimonial is going to drop in that common element.

Yeah, exactly.

All of this is editable even at this stage, like, I remember doing site maps like this, and there's always that challenge of, is the container representing the screen or do I have a lot of elements in the screen that I want to call out?

And this is kind of doing both, right?

It's like there's a hero area. Which you might, you might use that elsewhere too, but Navbar, you know, that's common.

It does, it doesn't specify what the NAV bar is, but we know we want one and that's kind of all we need to know at this point.

So the funny thing is, what a lot of times what we've talked about in the daily sprint and designing is, you know, the purpose driving the design and what are your design decisions?

And so AI has made a number of design decisions.

And here they are, right?

We looking at them.

And there's nothing about this.

I mean, we haven't even looked at everything else, but I would assume there's really nothing about this that is going to be egregiously wrong. You know, probably, but, We don't have any necessarily any depth yet, I think we'll get into that content, but we don't know how it made these decisions or why these are there.

Yeah, I mean, I definitely, in my experience of doing this, was, you know, you prompt it, put it through, and then it's going through each page and making sure that it includes the thing that you might have had at the top of your mind to include if you were going to approach it manually.

That's the one thing that is a question, which is if this is good enough right out of the box, then we could just generate, we could just go straight to design.

So that's called the sweat, you know, stitches done.

It's done the site map.

It's done.

It's thought about those things, and then it's gone ahead and styled them and even written, you know, copy.

I mean, publish, right?

Where's the designer?

Where do we need to be?

Anything you want to look in, in, uh, Stitch that you've seen.

I mean, in Stitch, I guess.

Can you change the style colors?

Like, does that update across the other screens or?

It's it's funny.

So movement, it came up with like mint as a color.

Yeah, I didn't see, I was clicking around to, to see if I can edit.

Yeah, there's like, are those flat image?

Oh, modify.

Okay, maybe.

Let's see if I...

Okay, so here's the thing.

So I've got it, it's off spinning something.

Um, but I click modify.

This was its 1st generation.

Yeah, it's doing something down here.

Apex electric.

Save and apply.

No?

Well there it goes.

It's it's waving.

Meanwhile, do you want to see what the wire frame one does?

Yeah, go for that and we'll let this cook.

It's going to be quick again.

So.

Now again, like, in my further research, I realize that what it is populating here is pulling from, uh, predesigned templates.

So you're not getting just random designs.

So yeah, it's taking components that exist.

So it's not just inventing 6 stars.

It's not just inventing, you know, weird configurations of images and text and headlines.

It's actually taking, oh, this is a hero image.

Exactly.

So like here, uh, I have these controls where I can change the header.

Style.

And it changes it.

Yeah, we got higher resolution from the site map.

Now, again, it's fascinating.

So just even reflecting on what we've seen so far, I'm, Again, it's not a real client, so it's very easy to abstract that this is great.

Because it is like what I would have made all those choices too, so to speak.

But where does it, is it, um, from a marketing website perspective.

Is this good enough?

Is this where, like is there really no other refinement necessary?

Like, meet the coaches.

An image, you know, you'll have a headshot, probably, you've got the name, description, socials.

Is there any need to explore more, huh?

And, uh, you know, in what it means to meet the coaches.

There are other templates, but yeah, I mean, they all equally do the job, I guess.

And like again, for our B to C experience, what else would you do with the coaches that would be custom branded, you know, bespoke?

I could see maybe that layer of customization could be that these are videos of each coach that highlight when you hover over them or something.

So it's not just...

I think the idea with this is that you don't just take it for what it is and that's it.

It's like, this sets, sets up a lot of the busy groundwork that you would maybe spend hours doing otherwise, and it just helps you speed up your design decision is my take on it.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and I think things like, so the thinking behind, like what you just talked about of video as a highlight, But I could think of multiple variations of what would it mean to have a video experience of a coach.

And then how do you navigate to the other coaches that are there.

It's almost like, um, almost like a YouTube, you know, theater area within a playlist, so to speak, of other coaches to the side, and you can just click through them, and and see them, or other carousel types of approaches, maybe some of those are in the, in the wire frames, maybe not.

But the, The thing that, it kind of gives me pause is, I don't know if I would want to explore that here.

Like, it, it takes extra effort to, to do that and you'd have to break out of this mode, which is part of why I think figma is excellent.

It's a totally free form and you can move stuff around.

You can get messy, you can overlap elements the way they're not supposed to be overlapped.

Whereas when you've got a structure thing, you're locked into the channel.

Yeah, and I think that they're most powerfully a conversation starter, if you're sitting with a client, you'd be like, okay, and then we'll have a section about your meat about your coaches.

And it could possibly look like this, but it just represents, Here's, A space for this content.

Now we can layer on additional stuff.

And so that would be interesting to see how this tool.

I wonder if, uh, you know, how deep that conversation goes if we're able to, uh, you know, leverage these tools to have, to continue having that.

I think there's a lot of value in that with non-designers.

Otherwise, they'll just pick a template and go with it.

And that's not what, you know, you're not trying to do that.

You're trying to guide them. Through the most effective solution.

Great.

Meanwhile, in Google, if it looks like some colors were updated, but not.

Yeah, isn't this fascinating?

This is the thorn in my flesh of AI and using words to kind of poke it into the direction you want to go in.

So, yeah, I don't know.

What do you think of, um, this again, like design process?

If you sat down and said, hey, I want to help this, you know, AI to help get the busy work.

The tricky thing is, I feel that it's taken some of that thinking away from you.

And well, maybe maybe it's 2 things.

Maybe it's like, okay, this is what it looks like, and then it prompts you to think.

How would I maybe display this differently myself?

And I can either go down the route of prompting for further iterations until it lands on what I was thinking, or I could just, Use this as a basis, draw it out myself. Separately and then it's enhancing what's been presented to you.

Well, I think this is interesting too, given your background is a brand designer.

This just came up with the brand, like, with the text.

My comment before the question is this seems to have framed your designer's thinking to look at this approach.

Dark moody.

Uh, you know, the photographs are certain, those are art directed in a certain way. You know, type, like every single element that's here, is here for a purpose or should be.

And that's already been thought for you.

But as a brand designer, Like your prompt is movement.

And then, right, that's the name of the company because that's incorporated that way.

You know, that's that's what you got to work with.

And then you've got the kind of maybe the prompt that you had.

Like, here's our background.

Here's what we're trying to do.

How would you have gotten to hear?

Like, would this have been where you landed?

And would you have only done one direction?

No, I don't think so.

And I think one bit that's missing. Is, um, you know, competitor analysis, seeing what else is out there and is this design that's presented here.

Just sourced from what's currently out there so then you run the risk of it looking the same.

Whereas if you had done the process of looking across the board, you might have said, oh, there's a lot of personal trainer things that look like this exactly.

So we need to be doing something different to make it stand out.

Well, what about like mood boards and like those tools that we would use?

I mean, I didn't do brand design. Dabbled probably comparatively, but in all those website marketing websites in years past, we would still do mood boards.

Because this is a mood.

Uh, but like the art direction of the photography.

Like that would be a whole section.

And again, some of that would come from your initial conversations with the client, like, what are you wanting to?

What kind of look and feel are you looking for?

And again, like you're saying, the competitive analysis, we don't see that here.

That would be awesome.

To then say, oh, I see.

Wow, these are distinctly different.

Yeah, we do want to, we want to pivot that way.

For all AI tools so far that I've played with, I get this sense of wrestling, or I feel like I'm wrestling, and I think some would say that that's just because I haven't, you know, adhered to the AI way of thinking about design, but I contend against that.

We, we were made to problem solve and think through this stuff and explore.

I mean, that's your platform of even the real world.

Let's explore more.

Now let's explore designs and let's go, you know, what gives us, what tool gives us the most freedom to do that and to make errors because we learn from those errors.

And we take a piece of that little, a little tip of the iceberg there and expand on it and go deeper with design.

We're talking a workflow.

I was optimistic at the beginning that I'd be able to have a workout app, and maybe that's the thing I need to prompt afterwards and see where that goes.

This is a similar divide that we've seen in a lot of design systems to date.

They're very marketing oriented versus productivity oriented, and they literally have different needs, but.

Well, thanks for joining.

I think you, it's been a great, uh, great hashing out of kicking of tires.

I think even so, we've just scratched the surface.

There's so much more that we could probably do.

Any parting words that you'd have for us.

Um, yeah, I guess.

Keep exploring more of these tools.

We don't need to be afraid of AI so much.

I think it's a fascinating place to start exploring and It's great to see.

For me, it's like seeing seeing it being used in a structured way so that you can be more productive, which I think is what the aim of it is, is to help us as humans be more productive, but it's still not going to have that human element touch.

Awesome.

Well, thanks, Charles.

Remember, Charles is going by the name of Overland Designer.

So reach out to him.

Email him at OverlandDesigner@gmail.com, set up a call and see how he can help you revitalize your small business.

And then check out Explmore, where he breaks out of the digital world, and goes around the world, and really builds a community driven with this adventure lifestyle.

Find up more at exploremore.com.

And then continue to follow, subscribe to the Daily Sprint, wherever you're listening to, leave a comment in Apple Podcasts as well as YouTube.

Really appreciate that.

Let us know, help designers know that we are out there.

And if you have a insight on AI, tools you've used, I would love to hear about them, I'd love to even have you on the daily sprint.

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Check that out and apply if it's a match would be awesome to talk to you more about design.

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Thanks for listening to the Daily Sprint, and remember, today is a great day to design with a why.

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