Design school taught us you should explore before you settle on a solution. In reality, most designers sketch two or three options, pick one, and hope nobody asks about edge cases or anything outside of the 'happy flow'. Now that prototyping is so much more accessible, going wide has never been easier. With that in mind, why are so many designers still designing for that happy flow only?

In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick talk about conceptual range and depth: going wide to find better design solutions before going deep one that one solution to bring it up to standard. They take down the "double diamond is dead" takes you read everywhere else and focus on the real day-to-day workflow of a modern product designer.

Tyler walks through his full process, step by step. He asks Claude for ten variations of a concept in a single prototype with a toggle to switch between them, shares it live with engineering and product, and narrows down from there. Before making any prototype, he maps the flow and edge cases in FigJam. Then he uses a GitHub connector to check his ideas against the real app, and the Figma agent to turn screenshots into design system-ready files for handoff.

Like always, Nick is more reserved. He shares what he learned from the Interface Craft course, why context switching while AI works is exhausting, and the risk of anchoring too hard on the design you already have. On one project, it took a developer with a completely fresh idea to break the team out of weeks of going in circles.

In this episode you will learn:

🔸 What range and depth mean and why you need both to land on a good solution
🔸 Why engineers now want designers to own edge cases and error states
🔸 How Tyler prompts for ten design directions in one clickable prototype
🔸 What to do while you wait for AI to build, without burning out on context switching
🔸 How to push similar-looking variations further until they become truly different ideas
🔸 Why Tyler never skips a journey or flow map in FigJam before prototyping
🔸 How a GitHub connector lets you check ideas against the real product and scope what fits in two weeks
🔸 How to get a full list of edge cases per screen before engineering has to ask
🔸 How the Figma agent turns prototype screenshots into design system ready files for handoff
🔸 Why new components still need real pixel pushing and craft
🔸 The risk of only improving what already exists, and when to start from scratch
🔸 How to apply all of this to last episode's hero section challenge

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More about Tyler and Nick Tyler: https://www.designtablepodcast.com/hosts/tyler-white Nick: https://www.designtablepodcast.com/hosts/nick-groeneveld

#productdesign #uxdesign #aiprototyping