🤿 the new design deliverable

This week, Zach Leach (Head of Design at Gamma) gives a behind-the-scenes of what it’s like designing one of the hottest AI products in the world today 👀

He shares a ton of techniques and lessons learned from working with LLMs—including some ways to make AI fun again :)

And we also learn what makes design at Gamma a bit unorthodox in all the best ways. Some highlights:

• What makes Gamma a team of “AI Pioneers”

• How Gamma designers prototype ideas in code

• How Zach has iterated on interaction patterns for AI

• How to think about AI functionality at the system level

• How Zach imagines his design role in the coming years

• What Zach has learned about designing AI-powered flows

• + a lot more

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

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🎓 KEY TAKEAWAYS

My highlights from how design works a Gamma

1 — Context is now a design deliverable

Zach is actively thinking about how to provide models more context while designing Gamma. This responsibility doesn’t fall solely on engineers.

Some examples:

• Where your cursor is

• What’s in your clipboard

• What theme the deck is using

• What you’ve recently written or deleted

• What content is alongside the thing you’re making

• etc.

All of this can be fed into LLM-powered features like editing imagery. So a big part of Zach’s prototyping process is piping in different combinations of context and seeing how it affects the output.

2 — Cursor is a design tool

The design team at Gamma has fully embraced AI coding tools like Cursor, Lovable, Bolt, etc…

Zach makes an important point that it’s not just about being able to make a 0→1 prototype… AI is also incredible for helping designers understand the code base.

I’m benefiting from this too with Inflight. It’s so empowering to open Cursor and be like “yo this is happening in the product, can you show me where it exists in the codebase and explain how it works?”

3 — Create loops to test models

Whenever a presentation is generated in Gamma there’s a little faces rating system 😍 😐

Gamma uses this to A/B test different underlying models and they even have an internal leaderboard to see which models are performing the best!

The interesting thing is they can use different models for each individual AI feature. Like maybe one model is best for creating outlines while another one is better for editing images.

Quantitative feedback loops are incredibly important for non-deterministic outputs. So I’m already thinking of ways to add my own 🤔

Meet the Dive partners 

I made a list of my favorite products and asked them to come on as sponsors of the newsletter/podcast. They said yes 🥹

The #1 way to support Dive Club is to check them out👇

Framer​ → How I build my websites

Genway → How I do research

Granola → How I take notes during CRIT

Jitter​ → How I animate my designs

Lovable → How I build my ideas in code

Mobbin → How I find design inspiration

Paper → How I design like a creative

Raycast ​ → How I stay in flow while I work

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