Research:
Ship Yourself Cards
A research project offering digital field notes for designers redesigning their careers.
What is this research project?
Ship Yourself Cards is a helpful card deck app researched, designed, and coded to help designers of all levels build momentum, tell their story, and navigate career transitions with confidence. Each card offers practical actions, mindset shifts, interview strategies, resource links, and storytelling approaches to help you design and “ship” your next career move.
Deep Research to Article to App
Through a structured Deep Research process with ChatGPT, I explored how designers rebuild careers after layoffs, leveraging insights from career coaching, leadership research, UX hiring signals, and personal brand storytelling. Synthesizing sources like Korn Ferry, Harvard Business Review, Julie Zhuo, and LinkedIn Economic Graph data, I transformed our findings into a long-form article and Ship Yourself Cards, a tactical web app to help designers regain momentum and ship their next career move.
From Design to Vibe Code
Step 1: Figma Mockup
I initially designed it in Figma to work out the UX and then the visual design of the app. I then imported Figma designs into V0 and began vibe coding the interaction design into a working app.
Step 2: Vibe Coding in Vercel’s V0.dev
Crafted with V0.dev and Next.js, Ship Yourself Cards brings AI-powered design and real code together to help designers navigate career transitions with momentum and creativity.
Design of the Cards Interface
In designing the card interface I focused on offering a pleasant and enjoyable color palette and a fun interaction design and animation, with the card flip feeling tactile and real.
Key Insights from Building Ship Yourself Cards
AI as Strategic Research Partner
AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude transcended basic assistance, serving as collaborative thought partners that accelerated market research and deepened our understanding of designer needs and job market dynamics.
Accelerated Prototyping Through Design-to-Code Translation
Tools like V0.dev, Lovable, Bolt, and Replit dramatically compress the design-to-development cycle, allowing us to transform Figma concepts into functional prototypes with unprecedented speed and minimal technical debt.
The Reality of AI-Generated Code
While AI code generation provided valuable scaffolding, it required substantial human refinement to align with our specific requirements—highlighting the continued importance of human expertise in software development.
Technical Boundaries of Current AI Systems
I encountered clear limitations when processing complex datasets or specialized file formats, revealing the threshold where AI systems still struggle with computational and structural complexity.
AI as an Intellectual Sparring Partner
Beyond tactical assistance, AI proved invaluable for structured ideation, helping to articulate complex concepts and explore divergent approaches to key challenges throughout the project.
The Essential Human Element in Curation
Although AI excelled at surfacing information, human discernment remained critical for evaluating relevance, quality, and credibility—especially when curating resources for professional advancement.
Career Development as Product Design
The "ship yourself" metaphor resonated deeply, reframing career growth as an iterative design process with clear parallels to product development: research, prototype, test, refine, and launch.
Connection
to Brian Eno’s
Oblique Strategies
Ship Yourself Cards echoes Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies deck, though with a design career focus. Where Eno's cards help artists overcome creative blocks with prompts like 'Try faking it,' my digital deck offers designers guidance at professional crossroads. Both tools harness the power of unexpected perspective shifts, recognizing that insights often come from oblique angles rather than direct analysis. Just as Eno's deck became essential for musicians like David Bowie, Ship Yourself Cards offers designers a moment to pause and actively shape their career paths rather than passively accepting what comes their way.
