Ask HN: How do you work with designers who don't use the product?

My idea for that is UI Drafter, which eliminates the need for graphic design thinking when spec'ing out and prototyping so domain experts can collaborate more directly.

https://uidrafter.com

It's not clear to me what this is? Is it sort of like Figma, but focused on card templates? The front page isn't super clear about how it works, and the launch app demo looks like a form builder for mobile?

The goal is to make UI drafts layout agnostic. IOW, it is not a graphic design program. It is for handling barebones requirements to software designers.

I thought about this some more through the day... if this is your app (I'm not sure if it is?), can I offer some unsolicited feedback?

I think there is a lot of value in what you're offering (the ability for product owners/requirement definers/etc. to define what is needed on a screen by screen basis). But that wasn't at all clear to me, as a frontend dev, on seeing your product page. I thought it was some sort of UI mockup tool. But that's not really the point at all, is it? It's more like a really precise checklist with built-in flows and prototyping.

What caught me was -- counter-intuitively, perhaps -- how polished the cards were. They look like UI mockups even though you say they're not really mockups. I thought they were finished modals that I was going to implement. No, they're really more like (or even less than, actually) something like Balsamiq (whose sketched look makes it obvious that they aren't designs, just ideations). In contrast, the polish your app cards had suggested that they were nearly finished UI mockups and actually worked AGAINST the idea that "hey, nevermind the layout or components, we just need screen X with this and that, which leads to screen Y with this and that". In other words, as a dev, I was too distracted by the polished UIs and how to implement them to realize that it was actually just a way to document requirements and flows (which would indeed be very useful vs something like a Jira ticket with a bunch of bullets).

I don't mean this as a criticism, but more like "oh, now that I get what they're going for... I can see the value". I hope that's a helpful datapoint...