About a decade ago, I worked at a design studio with a team of 12 people on projects that typically took one to six months to complete.

This year at Sierra I worked on a similar project: designing how to visually represent Sierra’s voice agents. This time I worked mostly on my own, using AI coding agents to explore ideas, build prototypes, and deliver the final design, Mossy. The whole process took two weeks, alongside my other projects.

With AI, a designer can explore dozens of versions of an interface in an afternoon and put one in front of real people by the end of the week.

Here’s how I brought Mossy to life, and what I learned along the way.

Start with something different

At Sierra Summit, we showcased our latest voice capabilities with Tandem Voice and Horizon agents. We wanted to show what our voice agents could do, but a voice interaction is hard to make visually interesting when so much of what’s happening is invisible. Whatever we created would appear throughout the event and needed to help people follow the conversation.