DEV Community: Cheeky Fit

The Importance of UI/UX Design in the Age of AI-Coded Apps

Cheeky Fit — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 11:59:21 +0000

Software development has changed dramatically. What once demanded months of design, engineering, testing, and iteration can now be accelerated by AI-assisted tools that generate code, build interfaces, scaffold backend systems, and speed up delivery across the board. This has lowered the barrier to building digital products in a way that is difficult to ignore. More teams can launch, more founders can prototype, and more apps can reach the market faster than ever before.

That shift is real, but it has also exposed a deeper truth about modern product building. When code becomes easier to produce, code itself stops being the main differentiator. If multiple teams can build similar features with similar tools, then the real question is no longer whether a product works. The question becomes whether people actually enjoy using it. That is where UI/UX design becomes central.

For years, many builders treated design as something secondary. The common attitude was that once the core functionality was complete, the user experience could be refined later. That thinking was never especially strong, but in the age of AI-coded apps it has become actively dangerous. A product is not judged only by what it can do. It is judged by how clearly it communicates, how naturally it guides the user, how trustworthy it feels, and how little friction it creates along the way. Those things are not decorative. They are the product.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions around AI-assisted development. AI can generate code. It can suggest layouts. It can accelerate output. What it cannot reliably do is create good judgment. It does not automatically understand why one flow feels intuitive and another feels confusing. It does not inherently grasp visual restraint, emotional tone, or the subtle difference between an interface that feels polished and one that feels assembled. These are the areas where product quality is actually decided.

That matters because most apps do not fail due to a total lack of functionality. They fail because the experience feels cluttered, forgettable, or difficult to trust. Users do not usually analyze an interface in technical terms. They respond quickly and instinctively. They decide whether an app feels smooth or awkward, modern or dated, clear or overwhelming. Those judgments happen fast, and once they happen, they shape retention, conversion, and perception of quality.

In practical terms, UI/UX design now carries more commercial importance than many teams still admit. It affects whether users complete onboarding, whether they understand the next step, whether they feel comfortable making a purchase, whether they return, and whether they recommend the product to someone else. Even small design failures can quietly destroy otherwise strong products. A confusing information hierarchy, an awkward navigation pattern, or an interface that feels visually inconsistent can create enough friction to push users away. In highly competitive markets, that is often enough to lose.

The widespread adoption of AI in software development has also created a paradox. On one hand, it has made building easier. On the other hand, it has made average products more common. Many applications now arrive in the market technically functional but visually generic, poorly structured, or lacking a coherent user journey. This is the downside of speed without design discipline. When teams optimise primarily for shipping velocity, they often end up producing software that works in a narrow technical sense but feels weak from the user’s perspective.

As more of these products appear, strong UI/UX becomes even more valuable. Code is increasingly replicable. Features can be copied quickly. Infrastructure advantages are narrowing in many spaces. But thoughtful design remains harder to imitate because it is not simply output. It is the result of repeated choices, careful prioritisation, and a deep understanding of user behaviour. Good design comes from knowing what to emphasise, what to remove, what to slow down, and what to simplify. It is rarely the product of raw speed.

This becomes even more important when the product itself uses AI. AI-powered products often involve uncertainty, non-deterministic outputs, and varying levels of confidence. That means the interface has to do more work, not less. It has to frame expectations clearly, communicate what the system is doing, and make the user feel in control even when the underlying logic is probabilistic. If the user experience is weak, the problem goes beyond poor design. The user starts to distrust the intelligence behind the product itself. Even a powerful AI system can feel unreliable if the surrounding UX does not provide enough clarity.

There is also an emotional dimension that is often underestimated in technical conversations. Good UI/UX design creates confidence. It makes the user feel that the product is competent, intentional, and worth their attention. Bad UI/UX does the opposite. It creates hesitation, doubt, and fatigue. This matters because digital products do not compete in a vacuum. They compete in environments where users have limited patience and constant alternatives. The product that feels better to use often wins, even if its underlying feature set is not radically superior.

This is particularly relevant for startups. Large companies can sometimes survive mediocre design because they already have distribution, familiarity, or established trust. Early-stage products usually do not have that luxury. They cannot assume users will tolerate weak flows or confusing interfaces. They cannot afford to rely on marketing spend to compensate for poor retention. If the experience is bad, users leave, and they usually do not come back. For startups, UI/UX is not a finishing touch. It is one of the most practical forms of leverage available.

This is exactly why Cheeky Fit is taking a different approach with the Cheeky app. Rather than using AI as a shortcut to generate a product quickly and treating design as an afterthought, the focus is on using modern development tools while still placing real weight on experience. Cheeky sits at the intersection of fashion, social interaction, and commerce, which means the product cannot afford to feel generic or mechanically assembled. In a category like fashion-tech, the interface is not separate from the value proposition. It shapes trust, self-expression, discovery, and buyer behaviour all at once.

That is what makes the approach distinctive. The goal is not just to build faster because AI makes that possible. The goal is to use that speed intelligently while still creating something visually sharp, intuitive, and emotionally engaging. Cheeky is being built with the view that design is part of the product’s credibility, not a layer applied later. In practical terms, that means paying attention to the movement between discovery, social interaction, and buying or selling, and ensuring that each of those flows feels deliberate rather than stitched together.

That matters because users in this category will immediately notice weak design. If someone is using a product to express style, explore fashion, or buy and sell clothing, the interface has to feel aligned with that world. A clumsy experience does not just reduce usability. It damages the perception of the brand itself. Cheeky’s direction reflects a more grounded understanding of modern software building: AI can accelerate execution, but the quality of the product still depends on human choices around taste, clarity, and usability.

The broader lesson is straightforward. As software becomes easier to build, it becomes harder to stand out. The future will not belong to products that simply exist or function. It will belong to products that create better experiences. That means clearer flows, stronger design systems, better onboarding, more thoughtful interaction patterns, and a more disciplined understanding of what users actually need from an interface.

AI is changing software development, and that will continue. But it is not removing the importance of UI/UX. It is increasing it. The easier it becomes to generate code, the more value shifts toward the parts of product building that still require human judgment. Taste, empathy, restraint, and design thinking are not obsolete because code is faster to produce. They are becoming more valuable precisely because so much else is being commoditised.

In the age of AI-coded apps, the real challenge is no longer just building something that works. The real challenge is building something people want to use, trust, and return to. That is where UI/UX design sits now, and that is why its importance is only growing.

Read the full Medium version here:

The Importance of UI/UX Design in the Age of AI-Coded Apps

Tags: uiux productdesign uxdesign uidesign ai appdevelopment startups fashiontech

How We’re Building Cheeky: A Simpler Look at the Tech Behind Our Fashion App

Cheeky Fit — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:52:35 +0000

Building Cheeky has been a lot more than designing a fashion app.

At its core, Cheeky is a fashion-tech platform that brings together three things in one place: fashion discovery, social interaction, and thrifting. Users can explore style, connect with others, and buy or sell clothing through one app experience. What sounds simple on the surface becomes far more complex once you start building it properly.

Why We Built It

Most fashion platforms today are fragmented. One app helps you discover outfits, another helps you shop, and another might help you resell clothing. Very few products connect the full journey in a way that feels natural.

We wanted to build something that felt more complete. Not just another shopping app, and not just another social app. The goal was to create a platform where fashion feels interactive, useful, and personal.

That meant building technology that could support not just user profiles and feeds, but also listings, seller flows, item data, media handling, trust systems, and scalable app performance.

The Product Changed as We Learned

Like most startups, our product evolved through real user feedback.

In the beginning, we were heavily interested in digital closet features, AI-assisted fashion experiences, and social discovery. Those ideas are still part of Cheeky, but something became very clear during testing: people got most excited when they heard they could sell their clothes.

That changed things.

Instead of keeping thrifting as a side feature, we moved it to the center of the experience. That meant the technology had to shift too. We had to focus much more on marketplace features, user listings, seller onboarding, transaction-ready flows, and a smoother product journey from discovery to sale.

Our Core Tech Stack

To build Cheeky, we chose tools that allowed us to move fast while still building a solid product foundation.

Flutter for the app frontend

We use Flutter to build the mobile app experience. It helps us create fast, visually polished interfaces while moving quickly through design and product changes.

For a fashion app, this matters. Users notice design quality immediately. If the app feels clunky, slow, or unfinished, they lose trust fast. Flutter gives us the flexibility to create a more modern and fluid user experience.

FastAPI for the backend

For backend services, we use FastAPI. It works well for handling business logic, APIs, and systems that need to connect smoothly with AI-driven or image-heavy workflows.

This gives us a flexible backend that can grow with the product while still staying efficient during development.

Firebase for authentication and user systems

We use Firebase for important app infrastructure like authentication and user-related data flows. This helps us manage sign-in, account handling, and real-time product needs more efficiently during the growth stage.

Building for More Than Just Content

One of the biggest technical differences in Cheeky is that we are not just building a social app.

We are also building a marketplace.

That changes everything.

A social platform mainly handles content, engagement, and profiles. A marketplace has to deal with trust, item accuracy, listing quality, reporting systems, seller management, and transaction flows. The app has to feel simple for the user, but behind the scenes there is a lot more structure.

Once users can buy and sell, every listing becomes more than just a post. It becomes something that needs status tracking, moderation, and a reliable flow from upload to transaction.

The Challenge of Fashion Data

Fashion data is messy.

People do not naturally describe their clothes in structured database language. They think in terms like “streetwear,” “clean,” “formal,” “good for a night out,” or “something that fits like this brand.” That is hard to standardize.

So part of the technical challenge is turning visual and user-generated fashion inputs into something structured enough for discovery, listings, and future personalization.

This is one area where technology can make a real difference. The better the system understands clothing, style, and presentation, the better the platform experience becomes.

Why UX Matters So Much

One thing we learned early is that functionality alone is not enough.

Even if the backend works, users will not stay if the experience feels weak. In consumer products, especially fashion, design is not cosmetic. It directly affects trust, conversion, and retention.

That is why we spent time improving the UI and UX rather than treating it like a last-step polish. A product like Cheeky lives or dies by whether people enjoy using it.

Building in Public, Learning in Real Time

Cheeky is still evolving, and that is normal.

Every startup talks about vision, but the harder part is taking feedback seriously enough to change the product when needed. For us, that meant recognizing where user excitement was strongest and adjusting both the product and technical roadmap accordingly.

The result is that Cheeky is becoming more focused, more practical, and more aligned with how users actually behave.

What Comes Next

The long-term opportunity for Cheeky is not just to be another fashion app. It is to build an ecosystem around how people discover, wear, share, and resell fashion.

That means continuing to improve:

the user experience
the marketplace flow
social engagement systems
trust and safety features
structured fashion data
intelligent discovery

We are still early, but the direction is clear.

Fashion is social.
Fashion is commerce.
Fashion is identity.

And building Cheeky means building the technology that brings those three things together properly.

Final Thoughts

Startups often look clean and simple from the outside. On the inside, they are usually a mix of constant iteration, hard tradeoffs, technical rebuilding, and product decisions driven by real-world behavior.

That has definitely been true for Cheeky.

We are not just building features. We are building the systems that make modern fashion interaction possible in one place. That is what makes the challenge difficult, but also what makes it worth doing.

If you are building in consumer tech, marketplace infrastructure, or fashion-tech, you already know this: the real work is not in the idea. It is in turning a messy real-world problem into a product that feels effortless to the user.

That is exactly the work we are doing with Cheeky.

Website: https://www.cheeky-fit.com/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/Previous-Quarter5699/

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What Early External Testing Exposed in Our Flutter + Firebase iOS App

Cheeky Fit — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:21:48 +0000

What Real User Feedback Taught Us While Building Cheeky

There is a big difference between building a product and proving that it works.

A team can spend weeks refining screens, improving flows, discussing features, and convincing itself that the product is getting better. Internally, everything can begin to feel clear. The logic makes sense. The roadmap feels strong. The interface looks cleaner. Progress feels real.

Then real users touch the product.

And within minutes, they expose what the team could no longer see.

That is exactly what happened to us while building Cheeky.

Cheeky is a fashion-tech product built around style discovery, wardrobe interaction, and social engagement. Like most early-stage products, it started with a vision, a set of assumptions, and a belief that the experience we were designing would resonate strongly once it reached real users.

But product-building has a way of humbling you.

The latest round of user feedback made one thing very clear: internal testing can only take you so far. Real validation is where the truth begins.

The Illusion of Internal Clarity

When you work on a product every day, you slowly lose the ability to see it the way a new user sees it.

That is not unusual. It happens to almost every team.

Founders know the intended flow. Designers understand the reasoning behind the layout. Developers know what each screen is supposed to do. Over time, that familiarity creates a kind of internal comfort. Things that are confusing to a new user may no longer feel confusing to the people building the product.

You stop asking, “Does this make sense?”
You start assuming, “They’ll get it.”

That assumption is where mistakes begin.

In our case, external users quickly pointed out things that became obvious the moment they were seen through fresh eyes. They found weak flows, unclear interactions, friction in key parts of the experience, and moments where the product simply did not feel as intuitive as it needed to be.

That feedback was uncomfortable, but it was necessary.

Because once real users repeatedly hit the same points of friction, you are no longer dealing with isolated opinions. You are dealing with product truth.

Feedback That Hurts Is Often the Most Useful

Most teams say they want honest feedback.

But in reality, what many people want is encouraging feedback. They want users to like the idea, support the direction, and overlook the rough edges because the potential is there.

That is not how good products get built.

Useful feedback is often direct. Sometimes it is harsh. Sometimes it points out things that feel obvious only after someone else says them. Sometimes it highlights issues you thought were already good enough.

That is exactly why it matters.

Real feedback shows you where your assumptions are wrong.
It shows you where the product is weaker than it looks.
It shows you where the user hesitates, where the value is not clear enough, and where your design intent is failing to survive contact with reality.

That is far more valuable than polite praise.

The Difference Between “Working” and “Ready”

One of the most important lessons for any startup is this: a product can work and still not feel ready.

A feature can technically function and still confuse people.
A flow can be logically complete and still feel awkward.
An interface can look polished and still create friction.
A product can run without crashing and still lose users quickly.

That distinction matters.

There is a dangerous stage in product development where something is good enough to demo, good enough to explain, and good enough to make the team feel progress — but not yet good enough to hold up under real user expectations.

That is where a lot of products struggle.

And that is where feedback becomes essential.

Because users do not care how much thought went into the product.
They care whether it feels clear, useful, and trustworthy.

User Validation Is Not a Branding Exercise

A lot of people talk about user validation as if it is mainly about visibility.

Post updates.
Share progress.
Build in public.
Create momentum.

That can help. But it misses the main point.

User validation is not valuable because it gets attention.
It is valuable because it gives you correction.

Real users show you where your product breaks down.
They show you what is immediately understandable and what is not.
They show you whether your value is obvious or buried.
They show you whether your product is genuinely intuitive or only familiar to the people who built it.

That is not marketing.
That is product truth.

For us, one of the clearest lessons was that users responded more strongly to immediate utility than to abstract differentiation. The more practical the value felt, the faster users understood the product. The more exploratory or socially-driven the flow, the more the user needed explanation and patience.

That changed how we think about hierarchy, onboarding, and first impressions.

Because no matter how interesting a product sounds, if a user cannot quickly understand why it matters, they may never stay long enough to find out.

Validation Also Forces Better Discipline

There is another side to this that matters just as much.

External feedback is important. But it should not replace internal discipline.

Not every issue found by a user is a sign of healthy iteration. Sometimes it is just a sign that the team needed to test more rigorously before putting the product in front of people.

That is a hard truth, but an important one.

Feedback is not an excuse to outsource basic product discipline.
It is a tool for making a strong product even stronger.

For us, that meant recognizing that some things should have been caught earlier, and that raising our own standards internally is just as important as listening externally.

That is part of building seriously.

What We’re Taking Forward

The biggest value of this feedback was not just a list of fixes.

It was clarity.

It forced us to see the product without the comfort of internal context. It reminded us that building is not about defending what we imagined. It is about confronting what users actually experience.

That changes how you improve.

You stop focusing only on what looks impressive.
You start focusing on what feels clear.
You stop assuming differentiation is enough.
You start prioritizing usefulness, simplicity, and trust.
You stop treating criticism as something to manage.
You start treating it as signal.

That is what we are doing with Cheeky.

We are listening.
We are iterating.
We are improving the product based on what real users are telling us.
And we are taking that process seriously.

Because that is how stronger products get built.

Final Thought

There comes a point in every product journey where the team has to stop asking whether the product matches the vision and start asking whether it survives reality.

That is where real building begins.

User validation is not always flattering.
It does not always feel good.
But it is one of the few things that consistently tells the truth.

And in product-building, truth is more valuable than comfort.

We are taking that seriously as we continue building Cheeky.

Explore Cheeky

Website: https://www.cheeky-fit.com/

TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/vbKVtUM6

We are launching our fashion tech app

Cheeky Fit — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:21:44 +0000

We’ve opened our iOS TestFlight for Cheeky — looking for technical feedback

We’ve just opened the iOS TestFlight for Cheeky and are looking for early feedback from developers, product builders, and technically minded testers.

TestFlight link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/vbKVtUM6

What is Cheeky?

Cheeky is a fashion-tech app we’re building around digital wardrobe interaction, style-driven discovery, and social engagement. Right now, we’re at the stage where getting real usage and honest feedback matters more than polished marketing.

Website: https://www.cheeky-fit.com/

This TestFlight build is not being shared as a “perfect launch.”
It’s being shared so we can identify friction, weak spots, technical issues, and product decisions that need to be challenged before wider rollout.

What we want feedback on

We’re especially interested in feedback across the following areas:

onboarding flow
navigation clarity
UI responsiveness
product logic and flow consistency
bugs, crashes, and unexpected states
edge cases during normal usage
places where the UX feels confusing, slow, or overdesigned

If something breaks, feels unclear, or looks unfinished, that is useful feedback.

Why we’re sharing it this way

A lot of teams wait too long before putting a build in front of real users.
We’d rather expose the product early, get direct signal, and improve from there.

From a technical and product perspective, early external testing helps uncover things internal teams usually miss:

assumptions that don’t hold up in real use
UI patterns that make sense to the team but not to new users
flows that are technically functional but product-wise weak
performance issues that only show up with broader device and usage variation

What kind of testers would help most

We’d especially value feedback from people who tend to look at products through one or more of these lenses:

iOS developers
frontend or mobile engineers
product designers
QA-minded testers
founders who have shipped consumer apps
people who are good at spotting friction fast

You do not need to be from fashion tech specifically.
Strong product instincts and honest technical feedback are more useful to us than niche enthusiasm.

How to join

You can join the TestFlight here:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/vbKVtUM6

What would help us most

If you try it, we’d love feedback on:

what worked
what felt confusing
what felt slow or unnecessary
what looked broken
what you would change first if this were your product

Direct criticism is welcome.
That’s the point of sharing the build.

Closing

If you take the time to test it, thank you.
At this stage, clear technical and product feedback is far more useful than polite praise.

We’re building, iterating, and trying to improve the product with every round of real usage.