RunEvr
Agentic project management environment for creatives
Start new thread

🎨 Do solo makers need a UI/UX designer?

by
•

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.

3.3K views

Add a comment

Replies

Best

I feel you don't need a designer but you have to have good taste and a good eye to really spot the difference between a normal website and a professional one.

 Yes, but makers are often technical, and they spend so much time zoomed in on development itself. So it’s not only about the website - every feature, popup, and button in a product should be designed with good UX in mind. So a designer can really help with that.

 Very true but I think that if you are wearing that solo founder hat you have to be good at everything like not pro level but at least enough knowledge to pull of building a product that is decent to ship and get customers. I feel that customers themselves will give that feedback required .

 Can’t disagree! =) The word maker itself maybe means a person who figures everything out.

As a solo maker balancing a head chef job and building my SaaS, I don't have time or budget for dedicated UI/UX design. I focus 100% on performance, accessibility, and high-speed UX (100/100 PSI, clear CTAs). For local business tech, utility and raw speed always beat fancy design trends.

 Agreed, but I guess you still have some skills that help you create clear CTAs and an interface that's easy to use. The designer lives inside you - you just don't need to hire them! =D

solo founder here, i do the design myself. what actually moved my UX wasn't hiring a designer, it was watching real people get stuck and then cutting steps. AI gets you to a clean generic screen in minutes, and generic is the trap, everything starts to look the same. early on you don't need a full time designer, you need taste and one honest tester who will tell you where they got lost. hire the designer once you know exactly which screens are your product's soul.

 Agreed! Thanks for sharing your vision =)

 🙏🏼

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 usually handle the first version myself because product context matters most early. A designer becomes valuable when usability problems start appearing.

 So, am I right that for you the most valuable part of a designer’s work is creating a good user experience first, and only then making the design catchy?

First
Previous
1234
•••
Next