Google Stitch: A Product Designer's Review

Google’s newest AI tool, Stitch, promises to speed up the product design process. But does it actually accelerate design, or does it create “design debt” that organizations must reckon with later in their product lifecycle?

To test this, I used Stitch on some past projects where I had detailed business and user needs, and content direction and user flow were already mapped out. Here’s what I found.

What Stitch gets right

It doesn’t skimp on the details

At its best, Stitch does a decent job of taking the information you give it and filling in some details, similar to what you might expect from ChatGPT. For example, in one of my tests for a farming application, I asked it to display fields, and it even included the size of the fields in acres without prompting.

Figma integration that goes beyond the bare-minimum

The most impressive aspect is the Figma integration. Everything Stitch generates can be directly imported into Figma, and not as static, uneditable SVGs, but as editable layers and imported images. This is essentially a requirement for designers doing iterative design work.

Context-correct ideation

When you provide only vague directions, Stitch can ideate surprisingly well. It’ll come up with decent content ideas and rough concepts for flows that match the context of requests.

Where Stitch falls short

Lack of consistency

Even for fundamental components like navigation, Stitch didn’t maintain consistency. In every project I tried, navigation varied from page to page, even after multi-step, detailed input of exactly what pages should be part of the application.

Generic visuals

Everything looks… the same. Regardless of how specific I was about art styles or brand direction, Stitch generated layouts with the same tired look and feel, swapping only the images inside cards.

Weak layouts

The layouts themselves were uninspired, often using common patterns in ways that just didn’t make sense, like endless hero banners with tiny lines of text in between.

Sloppy Figma files

While it’s great that Stitch imports into Figma, the quality is very poor. Expect 3x more layers than you’ll actually need, with a messy structure throughout. They’re OK for iterating on a concept, but for transitioning to a final product, you’d be better off starting from scratch.

My overall opinion

For designers, Stitch might have some value in quickly prototyping low-fidelity workflows for early testing with users. But even then, the quality of what it produces means you’ll probably be faster (and end up with better results) by starting from scratch in a dedicated prototyping tool.

Stitch’s real advantage is the direct Figma import: it’s definitely convenient to get something editable straight into your workspace. Whether you’re using Stitch or doing it manually, the amount of time for subsequent iterations will be about the same—but with Stitch, you’re locked into Figma, which isn’t always the best tool for early-stage prototyping, particularly if you’re intentionally working in low fidelity to test flows before visuals.

The content ideas Stitch generates can be decent at times, but I find LLMs like ChatGPT better for that. They’re faster and typically give you stronger, more relevant ideas.

As for visual design? It’s a total non-starter. The generated visuals are so generic and off-base that they’re unusable even as inspiration. If you’re looking for fresh concept ideas or even potentially something you could use as-is, Stitch just doesn’t deliver (and it’s far enough off that it doesn’t look like it’ll get there any time soon).

Thoughts for non-designers

If you’re not a designer and you’re looking for:

• A complete website or app: you’ll be much better off with a professionally designed template (like those available for WordPress). Stitch’s generic results and the amount of manual fix-up work needed mean templates are both faster and miles ahead in quality.

• A way to test flow ideas: Stitch might be workable. If you know Figma well enough to swap out navigation for a real component and wire up screens for a prototype, it can be a starting point. Just be aware you’re testing clunky ideas and definitely sacrificing polish.

The bottom line

Stitch isn’t useful for designers at this time. It has some potential for non-designers who can navigate Figma and who are okay with working from a subpar starting point. For most real-world use cases, though, it’s easier and faster to just start from scratch.

Levi Myers is the Director of Product Design at Bitovi, an app development consultancy. For hands-on, pixel-perfect design expertise, contact Bitovi’s Product Design Consultants.