The Gift Card Incident (And Why I Wrote This Book)
I nearly missed a critical product deadline because of a gift card.
It wasn’t a lack of skill or a complicated brief. I was simply stretched thin across three different projects and turned to AI for a quick shortcut. I typed in a vague, rushed prompt, and the AI handed me a result that was technically correct but practically worthless. Fixing its mistakes took twice as long as doing the work myself.
That moment of dread sparked a realisation: AI doesn’t reward shortcuts; it rewards clear, structured intent.
I wrote Designing with AI to move past the hype and treat prompting not as a tech gimmick, but as a core design discipline. This isn't a book for AI researchers—it’s for practitioners who want to use these tools to think clearer, move faster, and ship better products.
Prompting as a Design Tool
This book distils what I’ve learnt over eight years of designing digital products within FTSE 100 businesses and engineering-heavy environments.
Prompting is just another way of articulating design intent. This book provides the practical frameworks and mental models to translate your existing product thinking into reliable AI partnerships:
The Prompt Loop: A repeatable workflow to iteratively refine AI outputs without getting stuck in a cycle of bad generations.
The Five Layers of a Great Prompt: A structured framework to ensure the context, constraints, and intent you give the machine are foolproof.
Research & Synthesis: How to safely use AI to map user journeys and process qualitative research data without losing the human nuance.
The "Maker to Director" Shift: Navigating the career transition from pushing pixels to directing systems and intelligent tools.
Your New Thinking Partner
We need to stop treating AI like a magic "generate" button. It’s time to start using it as a highly capable thinking partner—one that expands your capacity rather than compromising your quality.
The Gift Card Incident (And Why I Wrote This Book)
I nearly missed a critical product deadline because of a gift card.
It wasn’t a lack of skill or a complicated brief. I was simply stretched thin across three different projects and turned to AI for a quick shortcut. I typed in a vague, rushed prompt, and the AI handed me a result that was technically correct but practically worthless. Fixing its mistakes took twice as long as doing the work myself.
That moment of dread sparked a realisation: AI doesn’t reward shortcuts; it rewards clear, structured intent.
I wrote Designing with AI to move past the hype and treat prompting not as a tech gimmick, but as a core design discipline. This isn't a book for AI researchers—it’s for practitioners who want to use these tools to think clearer, move faster, and ship better products.
Prompting as a Design Tool
This book distils what I’ve learnt over eight years of designing digital products within FTSE 100 businesses and engineering-heavy environments.
Prompting is just another way of articulating design intent. This book provides the practical frameworks and mental models to translate your existing product thinking into reliable AI partnerships:
The Prompt Loop: A repeatable workflow to iteratively refine AI outputs without getting stuck in a cycle of bad generations.
The Five Layers of a Great Prompt: A structured framework to ensure the context, constraints, and intent you give the machine are foolproof.
Research & Synthesis: How to safely use AI to map user journeys and process qualitative research data without losing the human nuance.
The "Maker to Director" Shift: Navigating the career transition from pushing pixels to directing systems and intelligent tools.
Your New Thinking Partner
We need to stop treating AI like a magic "generate" button. It’s time to start using it as a highly capable thinking partner—one that expands your capacity rather than compromising your quality.