UCD Surf

Find what matters in the design archive

UCD Coach

Practice brief · Design tools

Figma Make: AI turns frames into working prototypes

Published 28 August 2026 · Source dated 15 November 2025

Used for: Alpha assumption; Portfolio proof; Tool experiment. Practice brief for the gate you are in — not an industry digest dump.

Hype check: Hype. Sourced 15 November 2025 (10 months ago). Aged-bad claims stay on the ledger so you can find them again. Way back on the hype ledger. Aged hype.

Saves the claim and source date (15 November 2025) on this device. No account.

Figma's AI-powered Make feature aims to turn static designs into functional prototypes, which could change designer-to-dev handoff. It's early — treat it as an experiment, not a replacement for your process yet.

Figma has been rolling out Make, an AI feature that takes a design file and tries to generate a working, clickable prototype from it — closer to real code than a click-through mockup. If it works reliably, it could shorten the gap between 'this is what I designed' and 'this is what it does', and change how handoffs to developers happen. Right now it's still new and inconsistent on complex files, so this sits firmly in **hype** territory — genuinely interesting, not yet something to build your workflow around. Worth knowing about because it'll likely come up in interviews and portfolio chats this year, even if you're not using it daily yet.

Coach

take one simple existing Figma file and try running it through an AI prototyping feature (Figma Make or similar). See how close the output gets to what you'd build by hand — and where it falls apart.

Source: figma.com ·

Pair with UCD Coach

Coach is the forward habit — today's five, every morning. Surf is the rearward workbench on the same briefing corpus. Today's five is not restaged here.

Open today's five on UCD Coach

Daily email stays on Coach. Surf has no subscribe form.

More practice briefs on the same topic — not today's five from UCD Coach.