Business Case Studies & Business Publications

Coding User Interfaces with AI

Cowan, Alex, Grush...

Technical Note

Coding User Interfaces with AI

Cowan, Alex; Grushka-Cockayne, Yael

OM-1823 | Published November 18, 2024 | 17 pages Technical Note

Collection: Darden School of Business

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It’s a great time to be a creatively confident general manager, whether you're a product manager, a team lead, or in some similar role. AI has made it easier than ever to bring new ideas to life and readily test them. This note is part of a series focused on helping MBAs acquire (1) a foundational understanding of how to go from design to code, and (2) a smooth transition to hands-on practice to improve their intuition and creative confidence around the process. This note assumes some familiarity with the model-view-controller pattern, which is the idea that a given application can be usefully decomposed into a data model, a set of user views, and a set of controllers that implement the application’s behavior (for more on this, see a companion note by Alex Cowan and Yael Grushka-Cockayne, “Coding for MBAs in the Age of AI,” UVA-OM-1822). This note focuses on creating user views and organizes coding around four consistent steps: focusing and communicating design intent, unpacking things you want to happen into codable steps, effectuating between alternatives, and testing and debugging.