Traverse zoom is my metaphor for what designing and making in 2026 feels like. It's to cross layers of a product while prototyping, it's to be inspired by the process of collaborative prototyping with AI.
[ try traverse zoom below ]
When you zoom all the way into a UI, what happens? Usually nothing. You hit a wall. You zoom until it is all pixels, then you retreat. That is what design felt like for a long time. A craft inside a boundary. A handoff at the end. The rest was out of your hands.
But making in 2026 feels different. AI is making it easier to cross product layers like PRD, wireframes, mood board, UI, code, and prompts. Traverse zoom is my metaphor for that shift. Zoom stops being a dead end and becomes a way to travel across layers of what you are building. You define the layers, then traverse them however you want.
Original interaction concept and design by me. Built with Figma Make while typing in air with Wispr Flow. Process, in one breath: one day of brisk-walk brainstorming captured via voice memos, half a day of pen and paper wireframing, two days of high-fidelity design in Figma, then three days collaborating with Figma Make to bring it to life.
Small hack in Make: I built each phase on separate Pages in Figma Make as sandbox spaces, so I could iterate safely without touching Main. When a phase felt right, I asked Make to fold it back into Main, which is what gets published.
Project is featured on the homepage of Contra.