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🤿 cave wizards

🤿 cave wizards

lessons from the OG designer at Anthropic

Ridd
April 25, 2025

Anthropic has quickly become a category-defining company and this week Kyle Turman (their first full-time designer) shares a behind-the-scenes of what it was like designing Claude.

If you’re interested in startups, AI products, or the art of prompting then this conversation will be right up your alley.

Some highlights:

Kyle’s story of wearing every hat for Claude
What it’s like designing conversational UX flows
How Kyle uses Claude in his personal design process
Why Kyle only half-finished his Claude designs in Figma
How Kyle thinks about designing for emotion and feeling
How Kyle thinks about the future of design as a discipline
Kyle’s thoughts on whether chat should the dominant pattern for AI
a lot me

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts 👇

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🎓 KEY TAKEAWAYS

What I saved from my chat with Kyle

1 — There’s a piece of us in everything we design

“There's a part of everything that you build, whether you try to or not, that has a bit of you in it. Because if it doesn't, it's not good.”

Kyle Turman

That quote reminded me of something Tuhin Kumar said last week. He talked about how when you’re the first designer at a company, a little piece of your DNA is encoded into the product.

Kinda makes you ask yourself… what piece of you are you subconsciously adding in your designs? 💭

2 — Designers don’t talk about emotions enough

Almost every company in the AI space has a similar techy/futuristic/modern aesthetic… and then there’s Claude with ultra warm colors and serif fonts 😅

A big reason for that difference is Kyle put a lot of thought into the emotions that Claude should evoke 👇

“the only time we talk about emotions is when we're doing typical journey maps like “users are sad”, “users are happy”, etc. But every single thing that you interact with has feeling and emotion tied to it”

Kyle Turman

So one of my favorite parts of the interview is hearing how intentionally he crafted the early interface (despite making “thousands of micro decisions a week about literally everything”).

3 — Kyle’s Figma journey

Kyle only started heavily using Figma when other designers joined the team and collaboration became more important.

In the early days, most of his work in Figma was “half-finished” 👀

He would only do enough to get comfortable jumping into the code base because when you’re working on a non-deterministic product there’s only so far your mockups can go.

“ I used to get really into the details in Figma. And I realized that the details only matter if the users see them“

Kyle Turman

4 — Thoughts on chat as the paradigm for AI

A year ago, a common theme on the podcast was that designers need to “push past chat” because it’s too open-ended.

That sentiment has largely dissipated from what I can tell…

“I think that it's also really egotistical to say like, “oh, we need a new UX paradigm” without actually understanding why or what the problems are or what the benefits are”

Kyle Turman

Turns out Kyle has explored “hundreds of different UX patterns” to see if there’s a better approach. In the long run maybe there is… but for now it’s certainly looking like chat is here to stay.

That being said… this quote cracked me up 🤣

“coming up to an AI model is like going into a cave and where there's this rope and then like a hundred feet off, there's this giant wizard sitting on a chair and then there's a tiny little sign that says, say anything.”

Kyle Turman

There’s a ton more in the full episode. Some of my favorite parts are seeing the unique ways that Kyle collaborates with Claude and also what he’s learned about prompting effectively.

Definitely don’t miss this one it’s very good 👇