Designer Desk: a prototyping tool that makes gathering business requirements easier than ever

Every workflow project starts the same way. Business describes what they need, IT builds what they understood. The gap between those two things grows when there's no common ground. Designer Desk turns that gap into a working prototype.

How it works in practice: one-hour pizza session, ready prototype

The most common way to use Designer Desk is what we call a pizza session. One meeting, 60 to 90 minutes. A business stakeholder and a process champion sit down together to build a prototype.

"We started at 16:00, the prototype was ready around 19:00. After three days it was in pilot, after two weeks it was fully deployed. Right now, we have around 400 instances running in that process."

Robert Ogierman,
IT Project Coordinator at Raben Group, WEBCON DAY 2022

The business user describes the process. The champion sketches it in Designer Desk. They test it, challenge it, reshape it – in real time, together. By the end of the session, they have a working prototype that everyone can click through, critique, and agree on.

The outcome is a shared starting point. When the prototype is published, the champion opens it in Designer Studio.

“The prototypes we build with Designer Desk rapidly illustrate the “workflow mindset” – what’s going on, where it is, who’s got it, what their options are, and so on.”

Łukasz Nowak, Vice President at PCG Academia [source]

Second method: starting with the AI Process Builder

Designer Desk gives you a second way to start. The AI Process Builder drafts the first version of the prototype for you.

Describe the application in a prompt, or take a picture of a whiteboard sketch and hand it over. The Process Builder reads it and builds more than a workflow. It lays out the form, adds tooltips, and defines data sources. You have a working prototype in minutes, before the session even starts.

From there you refine it, by hand or by telling the AI assistant what to change in plain language. Need the prototype to follow industry standards or legal requirements? Put that in the prompt.

The payoff shows up in the session itself. Business reacts to something real instead of a blank page, which makes it easier to critique and reshape. Ideas get captured while everyone is still in the room, so there's less back and forth across separate meetings. The session moves faster and ends with a prototype the whole team agrees on. 

The governance boundary doesn't move. The AI drafts, but it doesn't decide. Nothing reaches production on its own, and everything that belongs with IT, stays with IT.

What is Designer Desk technically

Designer Desk is a web-based, no-code prototyping tool built into WEBCON. Business analysts, key users, and process owners use it to model workflows and design application layouts before any low-code configuration starts. It's where you figure out what you're actually building.

Where it fits in the WEBCON platform

Designer Desk handles prototyping. Business users model the process, design the form, and test the logic – all in a browser, with no code.

Four features make this possible. A workflow designer, a form designer, a field matrix to control what's visible and required at each step. At the end, one-click documentation that generates a full specification at the moment the prototype is ready. 

The boundary between Designer Desk and Designer Studio is architectural, not procedural. Business users can't accidentally push something ungoverned into production. The platform doesn't allow it. 

Next steps when business publishes a prototype

The handoff from Designer Desk to Designer Studio is not a PDF or a document. 

When a business user publishes a project, it appears in Designer Studio under a Designer Desk projects group. The process champion opens it and finds configured workflows, form structures, field definitions, and basic configuration already in place.  

The champion's job is to add what only they can add: integrations with external systems, automations, business rules, security roles, and deployment configuration. They're not re-interpreting a spec. They're extending a starting point.