Accelerating Front-End Development Through Figma Make: A Design Thinking Approach for a Digital Bar Experience App

This study presents the design and evaluation of Atake, a digital bar experience application conceptualized through design thinking and developed using Figma Make, an AI-assisted design-to-code tool. The application supports key in-venue interactions such as anonymous check-in, digital table assignment, mobile ordering, social posting, and real-time user engagement, all delivered within a privacy-first framework that resets session data daily. The development process followed the five phases of the design thinking methodology, incorporating focused group discussions and iterative prototyping. The high-fidelity front-end was generated directly via prompt-based inputs in Figma Make, bypassing traditional wireframing and manual coding. Usability testing with twelve participants yielded an average System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 80.6, suggesting good perceived usability, though the small sample size limits generalizability. Parallel evaluation by three developers produced favorable ratings for readability, maintainability, and integration readiness, but the limited sample constrains broad conclusions. While results indicate the potential of AI-enabled, prompt-based prototyping to accelerate early-stage development, future work must expand testing across more participants, incorporate comparative benchmarking against traditional workflows, and examine long-term deployment in real bar settings.