Your design team has spent weeks crafting a beautiful, interactive prototype in their vector-based design tool. Everyone's excited. The stakeholders love it. The team high-fives. And then... reality hits. What looked great in the design tool becomes something quite different when built. The interactions feel clunkier, and that special something that made the design sing has somehow been lost in translation.
Designers feel the UX has been compromised, developers feel unfairly blamed, the team overall is not as efficient and effective as it could have been and users ultimately get an experience that's less than it could have been.
The root issue? We're designing digital products with tools that fundamentally don't understand the medium in which these products will be built: code. And no, the answer is not Lovable, V0, Figma Make or some other AI app generator. We need designers and tools that understand code and how products will be built.
Vector tools are holding us back.
Vector design tools like Figma, Sketch and Axure revolutionised the industry by making design and prototyping more accessible. They're brilliant at many things like exploration and communicating a general idea. But they've created a false paradigm, one where designers work in an environment divorced from the technical realities of the products they're building.
When I first started as a designer (many moons ago) this separation made some sense. Development environments were complex and unfriendly to designers. But the world has changed dramatically, and our tools need to evolve with it. Designing without consideration for code is like an architect drawing beautiful blueprints but having no idea how they will be constructed.
False experiences
The experience gap between design and implementation happens because of two main reasons. Firstly, vector based tools don’t possess the ability to even create basic interactions like text inputs, or dropdowns. Secondly, they allow us to create interactions and animations that may look fantastic in a prototype and are easy to implement but prove technically challenging or impossible to implement as designed. Ask your engineers to implement “smart animate” and you’ll ruin their week (I promise). The existing vector tools are great for communicating an idea but designing and crafting a product through to production, they are terrible. This is why we need new tools that are code-based. This is why we built Rivveo.
When designers work with code-based components from the beginning, they design within the realm of the possible. This doesn't limit creativity; rather, it channels it productively. Designers can focus on pushing the capabilities of what's possible and contribute to shipping as designs can be directly implemented by engineers.
Misleading Testing
Perhaps even more concerning is how vector-based prototypes can actively mislead our user testing efforts. The prototypes we put in front of users are often simulations rather than reality. They behave in ways the actual product never will. When we test with these artificial prototypes, we're essentially making critical product decisions based on fantasy rather than reality.
With code-based design tools, prototypes are built using the same components and logic that will exist in the final product. This means user testing delivers insights about reality, not simulation. The difference this makes is profound. When users interact with prototypes built from actual code components, their feedback becomes immediately actionable. Teams can iterate with confidence, knowing they're solving real problems rather than artefacts of an artificial prototype.
Shipping Fast
The vector-to-code handoff creates a profound bottleneck in product development. Designs must be reconstructed and interpreted by developers. This translation process is inherently inefficient and fraught with potential for misunderstanding as most of us have experienced. It is not the developers' fault either they’re doing their best.
Even with the best documentation and communication, nuances get lost. Developers make countless small decisions that collectively reshape the experience. The back-and-forth to resolve these issues eats up precious time that could be spent on improving the product experience and solving user needs.
The shift to code-based design tools like Rivveo addresses these three critical failures directly. It's not about making designers learn to be developers but rather providing design tools that understand and work with code, not against it. Perhaps the most immediate benefit of code-based design is the acceleration of the product and development process. When designers create with code-based tools, they're building parts of the actual product itself. This has massive rewards in terms of quality and efficiency as everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.
Hopefully in this article you can see how vector based design tools are holding back and why our design tools and designers need to evolve. So, why not try out Rivveo for free and starting building products in a better way that makes your teams ship faster, test better and gives your users a better experience.