Designing, Building, and Shipping SeniorStories in 3 Days
Role
Product Designer & UX Engineer
Timeline
3 days (April 2026)
Tools
Figma, OpenAI Codex, ChatGPT, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, GitHub, Cursor
Skills
Product Thinking, UX/UI Design, AI-Assisted Development, Vibe Coding, Rapid Prototyping, Front-end Development, Design-to-Deployment
Context
For the OpenAI Codex Creator Challenge, I set out to explore how AI could transform my design workflow—not just for prototyping, but for building and shipping a real product.
In just three days, I took SeniorStories from an initial concept to a live web application. Using AI-assisted development with Codex, I designed and built an experience that helps seniors create TikTok-ready videos through guided, step-by-step interactions. This project became an opportunity to bridge product thinking, UX design, and front-end implementation in a single workflow.
Pain point
Challenges Seniors Face in Sharing Their Stories Online
After retirement, many seniors experience fewer opportunities for meaningful social interaction. Through conversations with my own parents and observing older adults around me, I found that many wanted to share their life experiences and advice with others, but felt discouraged by the complexity of creating content for social media.
Video creation often involves learning unfamiliar tools, editing footage, writing captions, and publishing content—creating unnecessary barriers for users with limited technical experience.
How might we help seniors share their
life stories online without requiring them to
learn complex video editing tools?
Solution
Scaling Across 13 Calculators
SeniorStories helps seniors:
choose AI-suggested topics
upload a video
generate titles and hashtags
through a simple step-by-step workflow.
Building with AI
Instead of writing everything manually, I experimented with AI-assisted product development.
Workflow: Idea → UX concept → Wireframes → Codex → Iteration with Cursor → GitHub deployment
Deploying to a live URL in Codex
GitHub repository
Takeaways
This project was my first experience taking an idea from concept to a live product in just three days using AI-assisted development. It showed me how much I enjoy the intersection of product design, coding, and shipping real experiences.
UX
Simplicity matters more than features for senior users
Large touch targets and limited choices reduce cognitive load
Engineering
Learned how to deploy production-ready projects through GitHub
Used Codex to rapidly prototype and iterate on UI ideas
AI
AI is becoming a collaborative design and development partner
The bottleneck is increasingly product thinking, not implementation
