Excuse this post if it’s messy. I’m checking out Lovable and want to just use it and type about it in this post. I heard alot of people are using it, and it’s replacing Figma. I don’t understand why yet. It’s only on sponsored or promoted LinkedIn posts by people who claim doom and gloom for designers and say this is the wave of the future.
Is Lovable the new thing? Let me find out. I didn’t know what to put, so I gave it a prompt that said “Create a portfolio page for a product designer that headlines his ability to talk about product design”
That sounds easy enough, right? It’s showing a lot of information on the left and things spinning on the right.
It took about 3 minutes to generate a page. Below is what it decided was the best choice.
I guess it’s alright? It seems generic, but it’s just a simple prompt. Who am I to judge? I don’t like the color, but I do like the stats showing projects, years, and … clarity? I don’t understand the clarity part. The irony.
I clicked on the View My Work and “Let’s Talk Design” buttons. They don’t go anywhere. I technically didn’t ask it to make more than this page, but it seemed like it may have taken the leap and attempted to show examples anyway.
I throw it another prompt: Add Portfolio Page
It says “Thought for 11 seconds”. It’s spinning again, so I guess that’s fine.
Something happened, but I don’t know if it did anything. I noticed there’s a scroll bar to the right. I tell people all the time, unless you make it obvious, try to point the user down the page so they don’t think it doesn’t scroll. I fell victim to that mentality. I didn’t scroll. Was this here earlier? I dunno, nothing was obvious earlier. So anyways, I scrolled and got a lot more information.
I see featured work that shows a neat card setup. I like how it shows the impact and key skills used. I may sneak that into my own portfolio because I like that idea.
It’s still very basic and plain looking. It’s a vanilla look, but also I didn’t give it any theming prompts, just a super basic prompt. Next up is the “Skills & Expertise” section which just kinda flows and doesn’t separate at all. They have a bunch of skill tickers. I always thought it was odd for the points and percentages of skills. Would you put anything down if you weren’t good at it? Would you put it down just because a specific job said you would use it? I can’t imagine putting down I’m “10% good at Lovable” and expect anything positive to come out of it. Maybe just put down that you used it a few times? I’m sure people can figure it out. The programs Figma, Miro, Notion and Loom are a decent touch. I don’t know if I’d call it out like that? I never heard of Loom, but now I’ll check it out.
I dived into more of the portfolio, and it has a giant list of projects worked on. They all blend in together, but the focus of individual projects seems well put together. A great starting point to dive further into.
I threw another prompt its way: Can you theme this website in a dark theme that’s futuristic, artistic and the main colors are black with blue fades.
Ok, that was a very bad idea. It says I have 0.30 free credits remaining today. It’s time to close this project.
Before I close it out, I want to check out the code. It doesn’t look like typical code? I have the option to go to Github. I have to connect a lot of things, install and authorize it all. After I connected it all…. I still have no idea what I’m looking at in the code. I admit, other than making WordPress sites with Divi, I haven’t solidly coded anything in about 6 years. So I have no idea where any of this is, how I can edit it, or change it. Is that by design? I was expecting to be able to edit the code at some point. Maybe I can, I don’t know. You can check out the Github here if you’re actually interested in that: https://github.com/cliffnow/design-talks-portfolio/tree/main
I hit escape and now I’m back to the beginning. Did it just torch all my progress without saving? I give it the prompt: Show the project I just created. It shows back up without using any of my credits. At least there’s that, but I don’t know if there was an easier way to do that?
Overall Views
I feel like I’m critiquing the actual prompt I made rather than focusing on what makes Lovable easy to use. I think it did a great job at generating a starting point for a user who is in a creative funk and nothing comes to mind.
In a perfect world, we have plenty of user research before we dive into something like Lovable. This seems like a cool tool to go in cold with a guess and generate something to show someone.
I think I might use this again in the future to come up with an off the wall idea, but I don’t see myself currently using this tool as my main source of design. There’s just nothing that shows me this is a Figma killer, as the “Suggested” LinkedIn content shows.
End Note: I feel like I should just record a session in OBS instead of just typing my thoughts out.