This project wasn't just an academic exercise; it was a chance to dive into a fascinating industry and explore the intersection of user experience, business viability, and emerging technologies.

The Spark: Curiosity Born from a Beautiful Venue

Why this prompt? My interest was piqued after my partner and I attended a stunning wedding in November 2024 at Gabbinar Homestead. It was a beautiful venue, and the experience was seamless. The morning after, witnessing another couple already setting up for their own wedding, my product manager brain started whirring. A quick look at their website indicated package prices starting around $30,000. The potential revenue for such a venue seemed significant – if they hosted even a few weddings a week, the numbers could be quite impressive.

This led me down a rabbit hole, researching the economics of wedding venues (a fascinating topic for another day!). When it came time to choose my UX design project, the wedding checklist prompt felt like a natural extension of this curiosity. If wedding venues are lucrative, what about the software that supports the wedding industry? The UX design course provided the perfect framework to investigate this.

A Novice's Advantage and Learning Through AI

Interestingly, I found myself to be an ideal "test subject" for this project. Having never planned a wedding myself, I approached the problem with fresh eyes, unburdened by preconceived notions of what such an app should do. This allowed me to truly focus on understanding user needs from the ground up. Thankfully, with many friends currently navigating their own wedding planning, I had a ready pool of users to tap into for research and insights.

Throughout this learning journey, I also made it a point to augment my thinking with AI chatbots like ChatGPT. This served two purposes: firstly, to benchmark my own ideas and assumptions, and secondly, to gain practical experience in how AI is shaping the field of UX and how it can be leveraged at different stages of the design process.

The Design Process: From Personas to High-Fidelity Prototypes

Following a standard UX methodology, I moved through several key phases:

• User Research & Personas: Developing a clear understanding of the target users – couples planning their weddings, and potentially venue coordinators.

• Competitive Audit: Analyzing existing wedding planning apps and tools to identify strengths, weaknesses, and market gaps.

• Design Iteration: Progressing from initial concepts to wireframes, then mockups, evolving into Lo-Fi and eventually Hi-Fi prototypes using Figma. This iterative process allowed for continuous refinement based on design principles and potential user feedback.

Bridging Design and Development: Experimenting with AI Code Generation

One area I was particularly keen to explore was the handoff from design to development, specifically whether AI tools could streamline this process. Could I use AI, like Replit, to directly translate my Figma designs into functional code?

I experimented with the Figma to Replit plugin and also tried using Replit directly, populating custom files based on the plugin's output. The experience was insightful:

• Not a Silver Bullet: The AI didn't produce a pixel-perfect, ready-to-deploy website straight out of the box.

• Iterative Prompting: Achieving the desired look and feel required significant testing, revision, and careful prompting of the AI.

• Designer's Challenge: This iterative process could be frustrating from a designer's perspective. Unless you're comfortable diving into the code yourself to make precise adjustments, the AI can introduce subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) deviations from the original design.

This experiment highlighted that while AI is a powerful assistant, the dream of a seamless, one-click design-to-code reality isn't quite here yet, especially for achieving highly polished and specific design outcomes.

Reflections and Key Learnings

This wedding checklist app project was a valuable experience on multiple fronts. It allowed me to apply and solidify my UX design skills to a real-world scenario, from initial research to a high-fidelity prototype. More than that, it satisfied my curiosity about the wedding tech space and provided a practical playground to explore the current capabilities and limitations of AI in both the UX research phase and the design-to-development pipeline.

The exploration into AI code generation was particularly illuminating, reinforcing that while these tools are evolving rapidly, the designer's eye and, in many cases, a developer's skill, remain crucial for translating vision into reality.

This blog is based on my notes, compiled by Gemini, and edited by me. This was a project compiled in February 2025.