I'm going to show you the two biggest UI cheat codes that can speed up your workflow, ensure your designs are beautiful and functional and can make any designer and dev capable of building amazing products! 

🎁 Try Mobbin → https://go.designerup.co/mobbin 

This month alone I have built three polished animated blending pages in an entire CMS, and I didn't generate it with AI. I didn't do it from scratch, I didn't use a UI kit or build a design system, and I didn't use a no-code tool. So how did I do it? Well, I used two big cheat codes. I'm going to show you how to start designing before you even open Figma and find unlimited inspiration, how to create dynamic designs that are functional out of the box, and how to do the heavy lifting of building a product even if you don't know everything about code or design.

Cheat Code No. 1: Work Backwards

Modern front-end web and app development involves a tech stack, and the most popular tech stack right now uses React and Tailwind. As a designer, I decided to do the same. Now, to back up a little bit, if you don't know: React is a JavaScript library that developers use to build websites and user interfaces. When we hand off our static designs to our front-end developers, this is the language they're coding them in. Tailwind CSS is a styling framework that makes it easy to customize how everything looks.

So as a designer, instead of starting with static designs in Figma, I used an existing UI component library. Now, these are nothing new. Front-end devs and builders have been using these frameworks for a while now, but I'm not talking about any old UI component library. I'm talking about the new generation of UI components that are making it possible to build crazy-looking stuff like this ten times faster.

For example, imagine you're designing a popover component or a navigation menu. Instead of starting from scratch and noodling thousands of interactions in your prototypes in Figma, and then annotating what you mean for the devs, you can grab a UI component from a library that's already fully designed and fully coded. Developers can plug it directly into your app. This saves so much time between design and code and ensures consistency between the two because it's built for React. It's completely styleable using Tailwind, without wrestling with weird defaults and without having to pick entire color palettes and color scales yourself. It's copy-and-paste, so you don't need all of those code dependencies, and it includes the sickest animations and micro-interactions like Framer Motion built right in. They also have UI kits for Figma so you can design with them.

Here’s the process I would use if I wanted to get started with these UI component libraries:
The first step would be to communicate with your developers. Have a conversation with them about what they're using. Are they already using React? Do they have a framework in mind? Is there one that you like that they would consider implementing? Then the next step is to familiarize yourself with some of these UI component libraries. You can sit down together and go through them to see what might work and what might have the components that you need. There are some UI component libraries out there with amazing documentation that are also open source, so you can go through all of this stuff in detail and see if it’ll work for your project ahead of time before you spend a ton of upfront effort implementing things.

Step three is to grab the Figma UI kit and then start using all of the components that are in there to assemble your UI screens and flows and customize them. For example, inside the Next UI Figma kit (recently renamed Hero UI), you’ll see that there are themes for dark mode and light mode. You can start by assembling these into screens, dragging in components, and customizing them. With Tailwind, you can easily switch between modes, adjust properties, and make components dynamic. It’s a game changer for ensuring consistency between design and development while speeding up your workflow.

If you're a designer working with developers, you can shortcut so much of the process by starting with these already predesigned components and just styling them. If you're a developer who’s not so confident in your design skills, these are really well-crafted and ready to go. You’ll have a great boilerplate as a starting point. This gives you more time to focus on the important stuff: user flows and experience.

Cheat Code No. 2: Mobbin

This next cheat code does all of your research and inspiration gathering for you, and it's called Mobbin. This is honestly one of my ride-or-dies because it’s a catalog of screens, flows, interactions, and screencasts of the best apps out there. It even has a Figma plugin, so you can bring all of these into Figma and work with them.

For example, if you’re working on something like Spotify Wrapped, you can pull in the flow of all the screens for that. Just copy it from Mobbin, open the plugin, and paste it into Figma. It will bring in all the screenshots so you can look through everything and get inspiration. If you’re a designer or developer who cares about making great products, you can’t afford not to subscribe to Mobbin.

Big shoutout to Mobbin as our sponsor. I’ve featured them in other videos, and it was really cool of them to support the channel. That said, remember not to let your codebase get out of control and unmanageable. Use these tools smartly and sparingly, and always focus on the experiences you want to create. Make sure everything is well-documented and that all components have their own unit tests to catch bugs early.

What I love about Next UI, for example, is that it integrates with Storybook, which allows you to document and test components effectively. If you want my full list of the best UI component libraries, watch the next video. I go through all of them, why I love them, and how to use them. I also have a course where I teach all of this stuff, so check out the link in the description below!