Piece No. 5: v0
Notes below.
I. Context
v0, an AI-enabled website builder, was launched by Vercel in late 2023, following a wave of generative AI writing tools like Jasper and Writer that came to market earlier that year. The team cheekily named the category “Generative UI,” intended to help developers prototype and build beautiful experiences, faster.
Before v0, Vercel was known as a front-end-as-a-service tool - enabling developers to easily write front-end code using v0 was a natural extension of the product. In many ways, Vercel created the space for and encouraged vibe coding well before the concept picked up traction this year.
II. Choices
A | Immediate exposure to community templates
While the v0 UI does resemble ChatGPT (clean, neutral), v0 breaks the pattern of a singular interaction point (chat box) by listing community templates on the landing experience itself
Given how often websites build off of existing designs and components, it makes sense to include templates upfront, along with prompt pills. It is different, though, than ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, all of whom lead with more streamlined landing UI (perhaps reflective of simpler use cases)
This choice could also communicate the importance of community to Vercel’s founder, who has a long history around public frameworks like React and Next.js. Tapping into community as a source of inspiration feels organic in that context
B | Distinct & dynamic preview mode
Users can fluidly toggle between the generated code (which is written in real time as users chat with AI) and the preview of the UI, upon code completion
Website builders are one of the few AI use cases in which users care about both the underlying logic and the presentation of this logic. Thus ease of access to both modalities - the code developers use and the interface users see - is crucial to creating a successful user experience
With many AI tools, we may not care about content beyond the immediate UI - for example, I don’t need to know the LLM code ChatGPT is using to respond to my question. Even in other creative or generative tools like Runway, code is rarely exposed. This makes v0’s transparency a particularly thoughtful choice tailored to its core user: developers
An elegant addition to the preview experience: the preview panel itself is dynamic and lets users make changes via a chat UI that appears on hover over any element
C | Generous use of guidance: steps, prompt pills, badges & buttons to move users
Deliberate nudges throughout the product guide users towards actions they may want - or need - to take (most notably, a large black ‘Deploy’ button waits in the top right corner)
v0 also articulates its build logic in more detail than other AI agents. This could be solving for the technical nature of v0 users, and their desire to understand line by line changes should they want to edit or debug later. It may also help users exercise patience given that v0’s complex tasks just take longer to complete!
The core editor seems lightly modeled off of IDEs - which may be a subtle way to hint at how v0 is meant to be used: to create, edit, and deploy - all in one surface
III. Conclusions
Vercel maintains its original minimalist feel in the v0 interface. This restraint is both challenging and commendable given the depth of functionality that v0 has; it would have been easier to build v0 as a separate product experience with its own palette & components
That said, I think v0’s power may lie in the elegance of its function as opposed to the aesthetic of its UI. While the product experience is clean, there’s still some clunkiness in the information architecture that surprises me - especially given that v0 is meant to help users build seamless interfaces. Perhaps craft for v0 means enabling users to prototype as fast as possible, and the priority may simply be delivering speed and flexibility over polish
Since v0’s release, other tools like Lovable, Bolt, and even Figma Sites have launched. I’m not sure the existing website builder market is big enough to warrant this many new products - and while I do agree that AI can empower more people to build websites, creating growth in the market, I’m not yet sure how many people actually want to design or publish websites on their own. Then again, Lovable’s incredible growth may prove me wrong - maybe the desire to build is just waiting for the right tools!