Wireframe to Functional Prototype With AI

Go from napkin drawing to app in 10 minutes

Hey, I’m Colin! I help PMs and business leaders improve their technical skills through real-world case studies. For more, check out my Live cohort course and subscribe on Substack.

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Gone are the days of spending weeks going from idea to testable prototype. With the latest AI tools, product managers and founders can now transform rough sketches into working applications in minutes - no coding required.

This guide will show you how to leverage AI to rapidly validate your product ideas and get meaningful feedback from users, saving you valuable time and resources in your product development cycle.

Wireframes with Excalidraw

The first step in our process is to create a wireframe. We want this to be high fidelity so the following steps follow our desired styling.

Excalidraw is my preferred tool for this step. First, it has a hand-drawn style that makes it easy for anyone to use. You can import components to save time with common UI elements and convert your designs from low to high fidelity.

Let’s build a simple Content Management Solution app for managing music. This should allow users to create content in an editor and view existing content. Here’s a quick mockup:

Lofi drawing with Excalidraw

Converting this to a high fidelity design takes just a single click using Excalidraw’s Wireframe to Code.

Convert wireframe to code

And here’s our result! Not the best looking wireframe but a promising start.

High fidelity mockup

We can apply a specific style by including instructions with the mockup. It seems counterintuitive but this is really just sending the image to an AI model like GPT-4o to generate code. Injecting additional prompts in the image is simple.

Adjusting hifi mockup theme

With this updated prompt, we get the following result:

Updated hifi mockup with Spotify theme

Prototypes with Bolt.new

Let’s get started with our functional prototype. I’ll be using Bolt.new for this demo.

I provide a simple prompt including a screenshot of our mock above - “We are building a natural soundscape product with a UI similar to Spotify. Please implement this design exactly”.

Initial prototype with Bolt.new

Pretty good! Let’s add some real functionality, like the ability to add new sounds.

“Implement the ability to add new sounds. There should be a hover plus button in the bottom right hand corner. Selecting the button opens a modal. The modal is a form that has all required fields for a new sound. Completing the form adds the new sound to the beginning of the sounds list.

Make sure to set up appropriate data structures first, then implement UI changes.”

Adding interactivity to prototype

Wrapping Up

Building prototypes used to be a major bottleneck in product development - requiring either significant technical skills or expensive resources to validate even simple ideas. But as we've seen, AI tools have fundamentally changed this landscape. In just minutes, you can now:

• Transform basic wireframes into polished designs using Excalidraw

• Convert those designs into functional prototypes with Bolt.new

• Iterate rapidly based on feedback without writing code

• Share working demos with stakeholders and potential users

This means you can:

• Test more ideas in less time

• Get real user feedback earlier in your development cycle

• Reduce the risk of building the wrong thing

• Save engineering resources for validated concepts

• Move faster than your competition

Whether you're a product manager testing a new feature, a founder validating a concept, or a designer exploring interaction patterns, these AI tools can help you move from idea to validation faster than ever before. The future of prototyping is here - and it's accessible to everyone.

Tools used today:

1. Excalidraw - For rapid wireframing and design

2. Bolt.new - For converting designs into functional prototypes