I just spent a session doing UX design from my couch.
The setup was almost ridiculous: talk to ChatGPT on my phone, have it work on the design in Figma, and watch the results appear on an iPad. We worked through eight or nine mockups, figured out the application flow, changed our minds, fixed things, and generally did what you’d expect to do sitting at a desk with design tools open.
Except I barely moved off the couch.
And it is so close to being wonderful.
Figma Mirror on the iPad is nearly perfect. It gives me the design full screen, updates as the design changes, and gets all the Figma machinery out of the way. Unfortunately, it assumes somebody somewhere else is navigating Figma. There’s no useful way to flip between the frames from Mirror itself.
I also got Figma running in Chrome on the iPad and, briefly, stumbled into something close to perfect. Full-screen design, live updates, ChatGPT making changes while I watched. Then I switched away, came back, couldn’t persuade it to return to that lovely state, swore at it for a while, and gave up.
Then there’s voice.
Voice is exactly how I want to do this. I’m looking at the design, not a keyboard. I want to say move that, make this clearer, lose that thing, show me the disconnected state and watch it happen.
Except ChatGPT voice can’t operate the Figma MCP server. So the conversational part and the part that actually changes the design are separated by an irritating little gap.
And even talking to the AI has an ergonomic joke built into it. The voice controls sit at the bottom right of the iPhone, positioned with almost supernatural precision so that they’re awkward to operate with either thumb. Push to talk, then push to send, and suddenly operating an artificial intelligence requires two hands.
None of these are fundamental problems. That’s what makes them so noticeable.
The AI can understand what I’m trying to design. It can operate Figma. Figma can update collaboratively in real time. The iPad can be a beautiful full-screen design display. Voice is a natural way to direct the whole thing.
Every important piece works.
They just don’t quite work together yet.
It feels less like waiting for some astonishing new AI capability and more like waiting for a few product teams to buy couches and try using the things they’ve already built.
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Designed a three page marketing site and a small iPhone app and barely moved off the couch. I am ready for WALL-E world!
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