Written by
Helena Dang
Everyone keeps asking me if AI will replace designers. Friends ask. Clients ask. LinkedIn asks every single morning. So instead of adding one more opinion to the pile, I ran a tiny experiment on real work.
The setup
I was designing a “done” state for a multi-step onboarding form. A few sections, each one something the user fills in, closes and moves on from. Pretty normal stuff. Before sketching anything, I asked Claude for ideas.
The answer came back fast and, honestly, pretty nice: strike through the titles of the completed sections. Clean. Obvious. The kind of thing you see on a to-do list and understand in half a second.
I put both versions side by side, Claude’s idea in grayscale and the one I actually shipped in color. Then I wrote down why mine won, because “trust me, I’m the designer” is not a reason.
Why the strikethrough didn’t make it
It breaks re-open
These sections have to stay editable. People make mistakes, especially on long forms. A struck-through title works great as a receipt. It’s terrible as a door back in. Nobody wants to click on something that looks cancelled.
It fights the visual grammar
Every other state in this UI shows status with a leading indicator, a little mark at the start of the row. Put the “done” signal at the end, or worse, inside the label, and the user has to relearn the pattern for one single state. It’s like moving the light switch in just one room of your house.
It confuses “done” with “gone”
When a title gets crossed out, people read it as closed forever. So they don’t come back to fix the typo in their company name. Then support gets an email. Then someone asks me why the form is broken. It’s not broken. It’s just misunderstood. Relatable, honestly.
What I shipped
A check sits before every heading, outside the section content, so nothing inside the step ever gets touched. The heading stays fully readable. When a step is done, the whole section collapses.
The collapse does the talking. It says “finished” without saying “goodbye”. Want to go back? Tap the heading, same as the first time.
So, will AI replace designers?
Claude’s answer wasn’t wrong. It was right on its own and wrong in context. The gap was everything my prompt couldn’t hold: the rules of our design system, the re-open behaviour product asked for, and how a tired person reads a screen at 6pm after a long day.
AI is great at giving me options. It gave me five in the time it takes me to find my coffee. My job is picking the one that still works once it meets the rest of the product, and explaining why in words the developers, the client and the roadmap all understand.
So no, I’m not scared. The value isn’t the person who can prompt. It’s the person who can filter.
(Claude, if you’re reading this, no hard feelings. We’re still friends.)
