UX design Design systems User research
You already use Claude to draft copy, review flows, write usability scripts, and sense-check design decisions. The friction hits when you open a new chat: it doesn't know your design system's naming conventions, what the last round of user testing found, why you chose this pattern over that one, or what the engineering team flagged last sprint.
You start from scratch. Again. That's the invisible cost of using Claude without persistent context.
Stash is a record store that Claude reads over MCP. Store your design decisions, research notes, system tokens, and project context once. Claude retrieves what's relevant, in any session, without you rebuilding the brief.
We're redesigning the empty state for the dashboard. What did usability testing find about the current one?
From the May usability sessions: 4 of 6 participants were confused by the empty state — they thought the product had failed to load, not that they needed to add data first. Two specific quotes: "I didn't know what to do here" and "I thought something was broken." The recommendation you logged was: add a single clear CTA with an explicit first action, not just an illustration and a tagline.
Good. What's our design system's naming convention for empty states?
From your design system notes: component is called EmptyState, variants are default, action, and illustration. Copy guidelines: headline is max 6 words, body is optional, one CTA only. Background always uses surface-02 token.
No searching through old Figma comments or Notion docs. Claude pulled from your Stash records in a single tool call.
https://app.stashlite.com/mcp → Save
After each round of testing, have Claude extract key findings and store them in Stash. Before the next redesign, ask Claude what testing has said about that flow — without digging through old reports. The context compounds over time.
When you make a meaningful design call — especially one you might have to defend later — stash the reasoning. "Chose bottom nav over hamburger menu because testing showed 3× faster task completion for core actions." Six months later when someone reopens the debate, Claude can tell you exactly why you made the call.
Store the bits of your design system Claude needs to give you relevant copy and code: component names, token naming conventions, accessibility rules, spacing scales. Claude stops suggesting patterns that don't exist in your system.
When you hand off to a new designer or bring a contractor in, you can tell Claude: "Summarise the key project context and design decisions for [product name]." Claude pulls from your Stash records and produces a structured handoff brief — in seconds.
After a design review or stakeholder session, stash what changed and what pushed the decision. Build a record of what feedback patterns keep recurring — useful data when it's time to push back on a request you've seen before.
The free tier gives you 2,500 records and 50 queries per month. For a solo designer on one or two projects, that's a full quarter of research notes, decisions, and system reference without hitting the limit. Pro is £8/month for 100,000 records and 1,000 queries.
https://app.stashlite.com/mcp
Stash is not a design tool, a research repository, or a documentation system. It doesn't replace Figma, Notion, or Dovetail. It's the lightweight layer that makes Claude genuinely useful in your design workflow — the persistent context that makes it feel like a collaborator instead of a tool you have to re-brief every session.