John Bai
Designer at SpaceXAI in New York working on Grok Bot, and the first New York design hire at Cursor.
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Their wordsI think that's kind of the way that we design these days which is you test out a concept and if it feels like it has legs you should flesh it out further but you know if it doesn't then maybe scrap it all together and and don't waste your time
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 1st of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsSo, I wouldn't say I start with cursor immediately. I think there still is the need for me to visualize it so that I know how in turn to communicate the concept back to cursor.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 2nd of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI think Figma is still the appropriate place to generate and build some visual conviction around an idea before you start committing to actually prototyping it.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 3rd of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsThere's a lot of discourse online these days about like we need to move away from the the chat interface and you know even if I complain about the three column approach to it. I think as I was using it it became clear this is still the right way for us to interact with a fleet of what are essentially agents carrying out tasks that are defined to them ahead of time.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 4th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsPart of the the game with prototyping quickly is that you learn these lessons early and you use that to inform the next step.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 5th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordswhen your target audience is engineers that expect something, they pay for something very specific. The exploratory phase becomes the opportunity for a designer to try out some of these more throwaway concepts. And I think you need to go into it expecting to fully throw them away, but to try it and to have fun with it.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 6th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI think it's still a very useful sketching tool. And I think especially now with agents being able to operate it, a lot of the annoying steps, like not even mentioning renaming layers, but laying out every variant of, you know, some of the stuff that you have to do a lot of typing for, I don't have to do that anymore because I just give the link to my bot and it'll do it according to how I describe it.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 7th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsit became clear to me that like the story that you tell up front is immensely important and you also kind of only get one maybe two first impressions for a user.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 8th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsThat is one of the things that I kind of believe in my core which is people will go through onboarding steps if it's engaging and it makes the value of what you're onboarding onto abundantly clear upfront
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 9th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordswhich is why I tell people all the time like it's not about you know adding a skip button. It's not about letting you just click through click through and jump into the product because these days with AI tools you jump into the product and you're totally confused.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 10th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsIt is much more important for you to learn exactly what this is capable of and how to use it before you're introduced to that first starting screen and you get hit with, you know, action paralysis.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 11th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsbeing like cursor will make this product feel like cursor and will attract the same audience, the same types of users. The rest of the pie will not be coming to this because it looks like cursor and they're they're already going to be kind of um affected by that perception.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 12th of 20 in this recording
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Our reading
A strong culture of unshipping helps remove complexity and focus on a product's strengths.
Their wordswithin cursor, we have a strong culture of unshipping. And I I'm really glad we do because that helped us remove a lot of the complexity and focus on the strengths of the Grockbot app itself.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 13th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsbecause I tell people this all the time. There's probably no two designers on the cursor design team that has the same process and has the same application of tools in their process.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 14th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI think every idea is backed by a prototype, a working prototype that not only you can present to, you know, on the big screen during a crit, but you can share the link and everyone else can interact with it and decide for themselves whether it feels right to use.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 15th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsAnd I think that's why seeing bits and pieces of it shine in the final deliverable matters so much. Like you said, right, the the initial hexagonal guy with two eyes, uh, that's not an art direction. That was something that was a seed that was planted that made his way into the final, you know, brand idea. And it feels good to be a part of that. I think you just can't be precious about your concepts anymore.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 16th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordsI think at this point, the fundamentals matter way more than a lot of other factors. I think people tend to gravitate towards how quickly somebody works or how many different tools they have in their arsenal, how many skills they utilize or their optimization strategy for the models
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 17th of 20 in this recording
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designproduct managementideas vs execution
Their wordswe're in a we're in a time where you can build anything, but not everything is worth building. It's much less about, you know, how many ideas you have, how clever your ideas are, but do they take the shape that somebody else would want to use
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 18th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordswe still believe very strongly in user research and datainformed decisions. The combination of those two factors and having such a wide uh range of both quantitative and qualitative data at our disposal
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 19th of 20 in this recording
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Their wordswhen there are thoughtful users you can really tell um they're the ones that have a deeper appreciation for or a deeper criticism about what in the product experience is working or is not.
↗John Bai - The Grok Bot design journeyyoutube.com 20th of 20 in this recording