Frontiers Media | Strong as a UX

Vibe Check: AI-Assisted First-Pass Writing

About:

As Frontiers’ design team moved toward faster, more iterative “vibe coding” sessions, rapid prototyping cycles where design decisions get tested in near-real-time - copy couldn’t stay a downstream, end-of-sprint task waiting on a writer.

Frontiers needed:

A way for designers to generate on-brand, near-final UX copy themselves during live prototyping sessions, without stalling momentum waiting for writer availability.

Work included:
Building prompt templates and reference guides that encode Frontiers’ UX voice, terminology, and tone rules, so AI-generated first drafts already match house style.

Training the design team on how to brief and iterate with the tool, what context to provide, how to spot broken naming conventions or ambiguity, and when to escalate to a writer.

Embedding the workflow into live vibe coding sessions, generating microcopy, labels, empty states, and error messages in real time as prototypes evolved.

Reviewing and refining AI-generated copy afterward against editorial logic and the wider platform style guide, keeping a human quality gate on anything shipped.

Outcomes:
Removed copy as a bottleneck in rapid prototyping—designers tested realistic, on-brand copy in the moment instead of prototyping around placeholder text.

Faster iteration cycles, since copy-dependent design decisions (button length, tooltip clarity, error tone) could be tested immediately rather than in a later review pass.

Freed up writer time for higher-value work—refining and validating rather than generating every first draft from scratch.

Built design-team fluency in writing “good enough” first-pass UX copy, raising the baseline quality of prototypes before they reached a writer.