A designer’s guide to AI: Why this designer switched to Cursor | Joel Unger

1. 0:00 – 2:46

   Intro and Joel's background

   1. CVClaire Vo0:00

      How do you think about design differently now than you maybe did before?

   2. JUJoel Unger0:05

      Initially, I was a little anxious, like, "Is this thing gonna take my job?" But you quickly find out what the limitations are, and that your thoughts and prompts are the only thing driving it, and all it really does is accelerate getting those ideas out of your head faster. Figma is maybe ten percent of the job, and a lot of the rest of it is just thinking about the problems. It's even greater. With AI, you can get right into the gnarly parts of the problems right away.

   3. CVClaire Vo0:33

      [upbeat music] Welcome to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI enthusiast, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we're speaking with Joel Unger, design director at Atlassian, who has spent the last decade building great products we all know and love, like Confluence, Bitbucket, and Trello. Joel answers the question, "Are designers really going to code?" with a resounding yes, showing us how he takes his Trello prototypes, puts them into Cursor, and builds interactive specs his engineering team can use to build awesome experiences. Joel is an inspiring combination of designer and engineer, and you'll learn so much from his workflows on how to build products, brand assets, and even illustrated puppies. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Paragon, the integration infrastructure for AI SaaS companies. Are AI features on your twenty twenty-five product roadmap? Whether you need to ingest data for RAG from your users' external apps like Google Drive files, Gong transcripts, or Jira tickets, or build AI agents that automate work across your users' various tools, integrations are key to building useful AI features. However, building every one of these integrations costs months of engineering, time you simply can't afford, given the rapid pace of AI advancement. Paragon is an all-in-one embedded integration platform for AI products. Industry leaders like AI21, you.com, and Copy AI use Paragon to connect over a hundred of their users' SaaS applications to ingest data for RAG and provide their AI agents with thousands of integration actions. They've accelerated their integration development velocity by up to fifty X, allowing their engineering teams to focus on core product features. Want to fast-track your integration roadmap this year? Visit useparagon.com/howiai to learn how. That's useparagon, P-A-R-A-G-O-N, .com/howiai.

2. 2:46 – 4:24

   Trello's new productivity features

   1. CVClaire Vo2:46

      Hey, Joel, so great to have you here. Before we jump into the demos, and I'm really excited about what you're gonna show us, I know there's a lot of changes happening at Trello, so tell us a little bit about what you're working on right now.

   2. JUJoel Unger3:00

      Yeah, I would love to, and I'm gonna demo exactly what I've been using Trello for in preparation for this podcast. So traditional Kanban-style Trello, I'm sure you're familiar with it, uh, cards on a board. Recently, we've been pivoting Trello to become your personal productivity powerhouse, and what that means is you can now quick-capture anything from third-party apps, like from Slack, email, voice capture, notes, right to an inbox. And so that means on the go, all week long, I've been having these thoughts about, what can we talk about on the podcast? And sending them to my inbox from my phone, dragging them into columns, and it's really helping me get set up. In addition to that, I have been using Planner, the new feature that lets you not only capture your tasks, but plan time to get them done. So you can see there's a lot of surfaces that have to play together, and one of Trello's principles is tactile. How can we have drag-and-drop interactions between inbox to planner, planner to boards, boards to planner, et cetera? And this isn't a traditional, like, sidebar toggle system where you can just, like, pop in and out, uh, inbox or planner. There's not really a center to this view anymore. It's... all of these can be up

3. 4:24 – 5:22

   Traditional design process limitations in Figma

   1. JUJoel Unger4:24

      beside each other at any time.

   2. CVClaire Vo4:25

      So you're adding a lot more features, and those features take space, and you're trying to figure out the configuration of all of it and build what, um, if you're not watching and you're only listening, is a, a quite beautiful product. So how did AI help you get to this great end state as a designer?

   3. JUJoel Unger4:44

      Well, I didn't start in the AI. Of course, I used the traditional design tools. I jumped into Figma and spec'd out, like, a ton of variations of, like, how can inbox, planner, and board all fit together on a screen, be responsive, and be configurable in any sort of which way the user wants to have them up? And it took a while, and I think any designer is familiar with this process. Like, you see, uh, specs that outline pixel values and widths. It's a bit tedious, but at the end of the day, you get your message across to your developers, and, uh, it gets

4. 5:22 – 7:39

   Using Cursor to prototype interactive panel systems

   1. JUJoel Unger5:22

      built to spec.

   2. CVClaire Vo5:23

      But it doesn't seem like this, this got you where you wanted to, to go with the product.

   3. JUJoel Unger5:27

      No, not quite. So we launched to beta, and we got great feedback. People were finding the panel system intuitive, but they wanted more control. They wanted to resize these panels and customize, like, exactly how they fit on their screen, 'cause we found users had ultra wides or really narrow, or they were docking their Chrome browser to the side. So we kind of had to immediately respond to this feedback and say, "Okay, how do we allow users to drag and drop?" And that is where Figma falls short.... Now, what I did was set up my developer environment in Cursor and get all the tricky parts out of the way. And eventually, it was set up and could just paste a picture into the chat and say, "Okay, start from here. I have a three-panel system. I want to make it drag and drop." So I'm in Cursor, and I paste in my image from Figma and say, "Okay, build me a three-panel system with a toolbar to toggle on and off panels." Guess what? Spelling doesn't matter. There are no rules. It'll interpret it fine.

   4. CVClaire Vo6:41

      My favorite feature of AI products is spelling doesn't matter. [chuckles]

   5. JUJoel Unger6:46

      So it's gonna go off, read the entire system-

   6. CVClaire Vo6:49

      Read it.

   7. JUJoel Unger6:49

      -and get it done.

   8. CVClaire Vo6:51

      Great. So then it's building out this code for you, and then what do you get on the other side of this as, as a designer that you found so useful?

   9. JUJoel Unger6:59

      It's pretty nuts, but if you have the right libraries to start with, it'll just do it. It takes a little bit of knowledge on your end to go search for what it is that can actually achieve these results, but once you're there, like, you're set.

   10. CVClaire Vo7:14

       And what decisions did this help you make?

   11. JUJoel Unger7:19

       Right, really nuanced, responsive design choices that I would've never encountered in Figma. Like, as, as you can see, dragging and dropping means you can literally have this in any layout. It's really nuts. So what happens when you drag from the side all the way to the left, and you have three panels open? Like, I d- I don't know.

5. 7:39 – 8:52

   From prototype to production: collaborating with developers

   1. JUJoel Unger7:39

      Like, let's go try it out.

   2. CVClaire Vo7:41

      I see how useful this is just from a user experience testing perspective. Did you hand this code to your engineers? Like, how did you actually take it from this to what we saw earlier, which is this beautiful production, you know, production experience?

   3. JUJoel Unger7:55

      I'm pretty close to my dev team, and I knew that they couldn't actually use this code. Like, they need to write unit tests. They need to [laughs] actually assure quality at an enterprise scale, which is a completely different ask from a prototype. But it got the conversation started, and I could start to tell them, like, "Okay, look, the min width needs to be this, and min widths need to stack, and now if you drag it past this breakpoint, it needs to collapse all the way to the edge." And instead of just, like, describing this, I could show them in a Loom video, and it was instantly understood.

   4. CVClaire Vo8:31

      And is this, is this in the product now?

   5. JUJoel Unger8:33

      It is in the product.

   6. CVClaire Vo8:34

      Let me see.

   7. JUJoel Unger8:35

      So there we go. A little different.

   8. CVClaire Vo8:37

      Oh, yeah!

   9. JUJoel Unger8:39

      And just shout-out to my developers, they caught things that I didn't even catch, right? So what happens when you actually toggle off all these, and it goes full screen? Like, can you drag from the edge anymore? You know. [laughs] So little... There's

6. 8:52 – 10:50

   How Joel used AI to prepare for the podcast

   1. JUJoel Unger8:52

      always work to be done.

   2. CVClaire Vo8:53

      Now that I see, um, podcast prep up here, I'm also gonna call out a little last-minute AI use case that you told me you did before we started w- recording. So tell us how you used AI to prep for your AI podcast.

   3. JUJoel Unger9:07

      You sent me kind of a run sheet of the topics we would go over. I pasted them into ChatGPT and said, "Okay, voice mode, let's prep," and [laughs] off we went.

   4. CVClaire Vo9:17

      Amazing.

   5. JUJoel Unger9:19

      So it's really great to just have, like, that live feedback.

   6. CVClaire Vo9:21

      How, how did you feel like it did?

   7. JUJoel Unger9:23

      I think it missed a few points. [laughs]

   8. CVClaire Vo9:25

      Yeah? What points?

   9. JUJoel Unger9:27

      Um, it didn't give me a lightning round question, and so context windows, too short.

   10. CVClaire Vo9:34

       Too short. Okay, and it wasn't... it just wasn't as charming as your human host?

   11. JUJoel Unger9:38

       Uh, undoubtedly.

   12. CVClaire Vo9:39

       Just-

   13. JUJoel Unger9:39

       Undoubtedly.

   14. CVClaire Vo9:41

       This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch: these tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs, and for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop-in APIs for enterprise features so your app can become enterprise ready and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today.

7. 10:50 – 11:23

   How AI saves designer time for deeper thinking

   1. CVClaire Vo10:50

      [upbeat music] Who was the benefit of this, this work? Your engineering team, you, did you save time? What's- what was kind of your takeaway from doing this prototyping this way?

   2. JUJoel Unger10:59

      I mean, my time, [chuckles] right? Like, it's so valuable to be able to spend it doing, like, the thinking part of the work. You always kind of say, like, you know, "Figma is maybe 10% of the job, and a lot of the rest of it's just thinking about the problems." It's even greater, uh, with AI. You can, you can get right into the gnarly parts of the problems

8. 11:23 – 13:50

   Last-minute logo animation using Cursor

   1. JUJoel Unger11:23

      right away.

   2. CVClaire Vo11:24

      Speaking of saving time, you have another design use case for us, uh, that came out of a last-minute pretty big ask of the team. Can you talk us through what you did there?

   3. JUJoel Unger11:35

      Just two days ago, I think, uh, there was a ask to replace logos across the products before our new, uh, team launch in April, and we're approaching a code freeze for that event. So it's down to the wire, and I was like, "Okay, no big deal, right? Like, a simple asset swap, we should be able to handle this." And I roll my mouse over the logo and remember, "Oh, shoot, it's animated." And [chuckles] we're the only product that has this sort of Easter egg that animates the logo on hover and on page load, and I d- love it. I, I'm a sucker for these little micro interactions.... So I inspect the code, and I think, "What are you, little animation logo? It's an animated GIF."

   4. CVClaire Vo12:16

      Oh, no.

   5. JUJoel Unger12:17

      Oh, no. And I think, I- who knows how old this is? Like, w- h- am I gonna be able to track down the files? No. And old me would've just eaten the cost of After Effects license and recreated it by hand. But I thought, "Okay, wait, I have the SVG."

   6. CVClaire Vo12:35

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JUJoel Unger12:35

      "I know SVGs can be animated. Can I throw this at Cursor?" I, I threw the vector art in there just to get a little start, and asked it to, to do a clipping mask, and it could do that. And then I said, "Okay, here's the image. Can you make these little bars go up and down?" And it interpreted all this crazy math, like, I can't even read this stuff. Like-

   8. CVClaire Vo12:58

      Yeah

   9. JUJoel Unger12:58

      ... this, this is robot speak. All I had to do was describe it, say, "Dance the little animation up and down." And I, I did have to find exactly how many milliseconds the animation lasts. So I [chuckles] put our GIF in an online tool, and it told me. But really, that's it, and the rest was just fighting with Cursor, with saying, "Oh, no, you have a few pixels to the left, a few pixels to the right," et cetera.

   10. CVClaire Vo13:20

       Yeah, that's, that's true designer work there, saying, not only do the pixels have to be perfect, but the frame rate has to be perfect. So show us what you got.

   11. JUJoel Unger13:29

       So hero moment, I show up to the chat and drop these-

   12. CVClaire Vo13:33

       Oh!

   13. JUJoel Unger13:33

       ... and it's live.

   14. CVClaire Vo13:34

       They're so cute!

   15. JUJoel Unger13:35

       Animated SVGs, and it's exactly what we needed.

   16. CVClaire Vo13:39

       And so you got it in. Last-minute ask, and you didn't have to sacrifice hours and hours and hours to artisanally crafted animated bars. [chuckles]

   17. JUJoel Unger13:49

       Exactly

9. 13:50 – 14:54

   Using Midjourney for character design exploration

   1. JUJoel Unger13:50

      right.

   2. CVClaire Vo13:51

      Amazing. Okay, and then I'm wondering if you can show us one more demo, um, which is a little bit around generating even more creative assets using one of my favorite tools, which is, is Midjourney. So I'd love to hear a little bit about how you have used Midjourney, what are some of your prompts and tricks, and actually, how are you getting this into the organization as well?

   3. JUJoel Unger14:14

      Midjourney's amazing. I've been tinkering with, uh, stable diffusion and the like for years now, and one of the most powerful things you can do just to get started is kind of like an image mask. You throw a black-and-white image at Midjourney, and it will just generate all sorts of fun variations of that thing, and you can prompt it and say, like, "Oh, company logo in a swamp," [chuckles] like, as a aerial view of an island. It's really fun.

   4. CVClaire Vo14:42

      So what you're doing here, just so I understand, is you're taking a kind of black-and-white vector-style image of your logo-

   5. JUJoel Unger14:48

      Yeah

   6. CVClaire Vo14:48

      ... you're dropping that into Midjourney, and then you're prompting it to do something really cool with that.

10. 14:54 – 16:49

    Creating a mood board for Taco: the Trello husky mascot

    1. JUJoel Unger14:54

       Exactly.

    2. CVClaire Vo14:55

       So who is Taco?

    3. JUJoel Unger14:57

       Taco is Trello's cutesy little husky mascot, and he pops up for onboarding in empty states and is beloved by fans of Trello. Now, I was curious, how could I nail this illustration style if it was even possible in Midjourney? So I spent, I don't know, an afternoon just, like, giving it my best effort. Cute cartoon husky clip art, blue collar, gray fur, soft blue eyes, et cetera. Like, just, just to see, like, how close can you really get? And it's okay. I'll, I'll say, like, i- it's not perfect, but what I've found was that it didn't have to be. It's more like a mood board, right? Like, this is something that you would put together and take it the next step, actually get out your tablet pen and draw it for real. And I think we're gonna have a design day coming up soon, where the designers just jam on this stuff and redo our assets and, and decide what is, like, a style guide for Taco. Like, does he have black eyebrows or gray, and does he have a pink ear or, like, what's, what the [chuckles] pink paws or black paws? I don't know. We need to make these choices and make a consistent character, clearly, and this is a great starting point for that.

    4. CVClaire Vo16:10

       Got it. So you use Midjourney, one, to test how consistent of a character output you could get, and from what you're telling me, mid. Eh, but two, it creates sort of a mood board for your design team to then go actually articulate what are the design standards that we need around this illustration, and maybe if you come to an agreement around that, then you can loop back around to Midjourney and see if you can drive that character consistency in the outputs.

    5. JUJoel Unger16:37

       Exactly right, and you gotta answer the really important questions, like, how floofy should the fur be? [chuckles]

    6. CVClaire Vo16:45

       You heard it here, keyword in image prompting, floofy. All

11. 16:49 – 18:18

    How AI is changing design thinking and workflows

    1. CVClaire Vo16:49

       right, so you know, you showed us three very, very, very different features. We saw complex UI interactions that would've been really hard to prototype any other way. We see re-creating brand assets with motion, which is pretty complicated. And then we see sort of more of the exploratory illustration work that's maybe an input into design work, not an output itself. So I'm curious, now that you've used these tools to do so many different things, how do you think about design differently now than you maybe did before?

    2. JUJoel Unger17:27

       Initially, I was a little anxious, like, "Is this thing gonna take my job?" And [chuckles] I think a lot of designers can resonate with that. But you quickly find out what the limitations are, and that your thoughts and prompts are the only thing driving it, and all it really does is accelerate getting those ideas out of your head faster. So that was pretty eye-opening to me, is realizing how much more value I have actually after using these tools.

    3. CVClaire Vo17:55

       Cool. Yeah, I agree. I mean, this is, this is a lot of great work, and what I say is it allows designers to sort of operate at the, the top tier of their craft, which is motion and interaction and brand and all those things that you wanna do versus mocking up.... UI. Okay, thank you for showing us all that stuff. Um, it's really exciting. It's giving us a, a couple very specific things we can bring

12. 18:18 – 20:55

    Lightning round and closing thoughts

    1. CVClaire Vo18:18

       into our own design work. But let's hit you with a lightning round, and then get you back to all these exciting launches you have going on. So-

    2. JUJoel Unger18:26

       Thank you.

    3. CVClaire Vo18:26

       You showed us a bunch of tools. What's the number one AI tool you think product designers need to know right now?

    4. JUJoel Unger18:33

       I'm biased, but I think you should jump into Cursor, and it's a little bit of a learning curve, so I'd say partner with a developer friend who can get you set up. But once you are set up, man, your, your speed just is 10X'd.

    5. CVClaire Vo18:47

       Amazing. And so what is a design task that you thought AI would be good at, that it wasn't?

    6. JUJoel Unger18:53

       I think really simple, like, responsive stuff was surprisingly hard. Like, it can't see your browser, so you have to kind of, like, take a bunch of screenshots and send it what it looks like at various sizes. So that's interesting, and I think that problem will be solved very soon once the agent gets access to be able to, like, see the browser.

    7. CVClaire Vo19:15

       Okay, and then I saw you do what we all do, which is we argue with Cursor in the sidebar. What is your go-to get Cursor unstuck prompt technique? Are you a yeller? Are you a pleader? Do you offer money? What is your style?

    8. JUJoel Unger19:32

       [laughs] Well, it knows it has my money. Um, yeah, I, I call it a, an amateur, I think, sometimes. [laughs]

    9. CVClaire Vo19:43

       Okay, so you neg. You neg Cursor.

    10. JUJoel Unger19:46

        I, I do. I... Like, "What is this junior-tiered nonsense?" Um, no, it, it can- it makes me feel bad, because if you turn on thinking mode, it will say, "User is angry at me." I should be, like, you know, I should [laughs] do my job better. Like, [laughs] oh, no.

    11. CVClaire Vo20:02

        All right, this has been so fun. Thank you for giving us some practical applications of how you can use this in design. The products look great, the work is exciting, and you're clearly having a lot of fun.

    12. JUJoel Unger20:13

        Yeah.

    13. CVClaire Vo20:13

        So, uh, to end, where, where can we find you, and where can we be helpful?

    14. JUJoel Unger20:18

        Yeah. Uh, joelunger.com, and also Trello. Go check it out. It's awesome.

    15. CVClaire Vo20:23

        Amazing. Well, thank you, Joel. [upbeat music] Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed the show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube, or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.

Episode duration: 20:55