AI Prototyper: A Figma Plugin for Decomposition-Based GUI Prototyping with LLMs
Software Engineering
Summary
The authors developed AI Prototyper, a tool that helps create graphical user interface (GUI) designs automatically from simple text descriptions, like a login page. It breaks down the description into parts, finds matching design components from a library, and creates editable layers in Figma, a design tool. Users can review and adjust the parts before the design is finalized. Their tests showed people made more prototypes faster and experts liked the AI-generated designs better than manual ones. The tool also works with multiple languages including Thai, English, and Mandarin.
Authors
Tawatchai Salangsingha, Sami Ashkan, Md Zia Ullah, Iain McGregor
Abstract
Graphical user interface (GUI) prototyping remains a time-consuming activity that demands both design expertise and considerable manual effort. As GUI prototypes are non-code artifacts that evolve alongside requirements throughout the development cycle, automating their generation is directly relevant to software maintenance and evolution. We present AI Prototyper, an open-source Figma plugin that automates GUI prototyping through a decomposition and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline. Given a natural-language description of a desired screen, such as a login page or a product detail card, the plugin decomposes the request into discrete GUI features, retrieves matching components from a custom 32-primitive library, and renders each component as a fully editable Figma layer with auto-layout. The pipeline uses Gemini 2.5 Flash as its LLM back-end and a Node.js/Express service. Unlike existing decomposition-based tools, AI Prototyper introduces a human-in-the-loop editing step that lets users review, modify, or extend the generated feature list before rendering, uses a different technology stack and LLM family, and supports multilingual input, producing correctly labelled interfaces in Thai, English, and Mandarin Chinese. In a preliminary evaluation, participants using AI Prototyper completed more prototypes in a fixed time window than those working manually, and expert practitioners rated the AI-generated prototypes higher across nine quality dimensions. A demonstration video is available at https://youtu.be/pRoFAH7MQaE. The source code and component library are available at https://github.com/tongsalangsingha/AI-prototyper-tool