Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by submeta 559 days ago
I am about to draft a UI and user flow for an internal tool (an LLM based RAG). I was thinking about using Vercel/V0. Is this an option? What else can I use? Is Figma a must have in my tool belt?
2 comments

This is a RAG search I built with NextJS, Pinecone and Langchain. It also uses AI for content tagging and summarisation.

https://www.uxlift.org/search/

I made a quick wireframe in Figma, but didn’t bother to pixel-perfect it. I mostly design in the browser, but taking a few minutes in figma up-front to get the shape of it saves time in the long run.

If I’m designing for stakeholders or dev teams I’ll still absolutely produce full prototypes and designs otherwise bad things happen. Figma is the current market leader, but you could use anything that you can communicate your intent well enough with, from the back of an envelope to a competitor like Penpot or Sketch. Just don’t use Photoshop.

V0 is interesting, but the results can be inconsistent. For my site I just copied and pasted the shadcn components I wanted and tweaked the styling to fit. Not sure V0 would be faster, though it might be useful for generating ideas. Depends on how much control you want over the final layout.

Great work on the website! Figma is definitely the way to go. Having everything spec’d out beforehand makes implementation and iteration so much easier and faster.
Wow, excellent site. Very useful!
Start prototyping the user journey in Figma to map out the flow. For frontend, use Next.js or Vite/Vike, which we use at Veryfront for its lightweight and performance. Simple API calls (e.g., OpenAI) can use a server function, but for RAG, I’d recommend a Python backend service.