Week Two (Part 2): Hesti's UI Comes To Life
- Sky Ryder
- Jan 21
- 2 min read
Hesti Project Update — Building the First Prototype
Over the past three weeks, we’ve been exploring two possible paths for Hesti’s first prototype: Google’s Antigravity and Wix’s Base44. Both platforms offer powerful tools, but after weighing the pros and cons, we chose to begin with Base44. The decision came down to two things: speed and accessibility. With my limited coding experience, Base44 offered a gentler learning curve and the fastest route to generating a functional first draft of Hesti.
Antigravity remains the long‑term destination for Hesti’s advanced back‑end intelligence, but Base44 is the right place to build the skeleton — the shape, the feel, and the early behaviors of Hesti’s interface.
To my surprise, creating Hesti’s first UI prototype was far easier than expected. Because we spent a full week planning the structure, emotional grammar, and functional priorities, we knew exactly what we wanted the first version to look like. Once the vision was submitted to Base44, the platform flagged it as a “sophisticated module”… and then built it in under seven minutes.
What Base44 delivered was a fully functional home page and six operational modules:
Chat with Hesti’s AI
Inventory management
Staff scheduling with AI‑assisted auto‑generation
Smart pre‑shift brief generator
Floorplan optimization tool
End‑of‑day sales and performance reporting with long‑term team analytics
Even in this early form, the foundation is strong — strong enough to rival the function capabilities of established hospitality platforms like POS, Silverware and LiteSpeed. That alone was astonishing.
Visually, Base44’s first draft landed surprisingly close to what we imagined. But this is where the first real challenge emerged. Adjusting layout, color, and object placement across web and mobile views became a test of patience. Base44 understood the intent, but its execution felt… partially colorblind. After two hours of iteration — rewriting instructions, editing assets in Photoshop, resizing, exporting, re‑uploading — the layout finally reached a point that felt right for Hesti’s first preview.
Still, something was missing: Hesti’s identity. Her presence. So I dove into Adobe Stock, searching for the right hero image — something warm, intelligent, and quietly powerful. After refining the slogan and typography, the moment clicked. Hesti felt alive.
Hesti's First Draft Summary
A functioning interface for both web and mobile
Six operational modules with AI and voice‑command capabilities
A visual foundation that already hints at Hesti’s warmth and professionalism
A strong starting point for evolving into an elite, emotionally resonant user interface
What comes next
Now begins the polishing phase — refining each function, tightening the emotional grammar, and establishing the blueprint that will guide Hesti’s evolution. Once Base44’s limits are reached, we’ll transition to Antigravity to build the deeper, more sophisticated systems that will define Hesti’s true form at launch.
Hesti’s journey has officially begun. And the first steps are more promising than we imagined. Looking forward to update further progress.
Ron Yee I Founder
Sky Ryder Studio
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