Your first board

Before you start, connect GoBanana to your agent. See Set up. Check it with “check my GoBanana connection”: the agent runs ping and replies with your email.

1. Ask

Name one page and, if you can, the platform. Good first prompts:

Website

Go wild on the launch page for our specialty coffee roaster. Website.

Mobile

Crazy ideas for the onboarding of our budgeting app on iPhone.

Web app

Make the empty dashboard of our analytics tool weird. Web app, wildness 4.

Whole product

Go wild on our banking app.

The agent will not bend the whole product. It asks “Where should the weirdness go?” and offers spots like onboarding, empty state, paywall and year in review. Pick 1 to 3.

Useful extras you can add in the same sentence:

• Wildness: “a bit fresher” is 1 or 2, “go wild” is 4, “bananas” is 5. The default is 3, Weird.
• Taste words: “minimal, big typography, dark mode”. Without them, each direction uses its own style words.
• A culture lens: “with a Sadu weaving lens”. See Wildness, moves and lenses.
• A count: “give me 2 directions”. The agent never shows more than 4.
• “Just go”: the agent will not ask anything. It guesses and tells you what it assumed.

2. Watch

With the plugin installed, the gobanana-explore skill runs this sequence. You see the tool calls in your client.

1. get_canvas lists your recent boards. If one is for the same product, the agent adds to it. Otherwise new_canvas makes a new one, hidden for now.
2. bend_brief with your brief, platform, pages and count: 8. Eight ideas come back, each with a spec.
3. The agent drops ideas with no UI path or that repeat another, and shortlists 3.
4. search_references once per shortlisted direction, with count: 12. Each search costs 1 of your monthly searches.
5. rate_references after each search. Junk leaves the tray. A weak lane gets one or two retries with better words.
6. rate_directions keeps the shown directions and drops the rest, with reasons.
7. add_to_canvas places 2 to 4 art items and 6 to 8 UI items per direction, each with a steal: note, plus one idea note. arrange_canvas tidies the board.
8. open_canvas shows the finished board.

Searches used

A first board usually uses 3 searches (one per direction), plus 1 or 2 if a lane needed a retry. The Free plan has 30 a month.

3. Read the reply

The reply is short and in a fixed order:

1. The board link. “Open the board here: https://gobanana.fun/c/…”. If your client shows MCP Apps, the board is also open inline above.

2. One line with platform, page and wildness.

3. A card per direction, for example:

   1. Checkout as a frosted vinyl sleeve (transplant + material) Pattern: fare summary slides out of a sleeve. Signature: a half-moon cutout shows the total. Look: condensed grotesk, frosted off-white with one ink blue accent; the sleeve slides 200ms, still with reduced motion. Why it fits: travel tickets are objects people keep. Art direction: Frosted record sleeve (pinterest.com), Clear vinyl packaging (behance.net) UI: Glass payment sheet (dribbble.com), Fare breakdown card (dribbble.com)

   Every reference in the reply is a link to its source.

4. One line on dropped ideas: “Dropped 5 of 8 ideas: 3 had no clear screen idea, 1 found too few UI references, 1 repeated another.”

5. One line on removed results: “Removed 6 results (2 shop listings, 1 web dashboard, 3 off idea).”

6. Next steps.

4. Look at the board

Open the link. Each kept direction has its own section: the idea note, the Art direction row, and the UI references grid below it. Hover or focus a tile to see its steal note and source. See Reading a board.

5. Go further

Say	What happens
“Wilder” or “turn it down”	A new bend at wildness N+1 or N-1, added to the same board
“Palette from direction 2”	Colors with WCAG contrast tags, as swatches on the board. Guide
“Frankenstein it”	3 or 4 new page variants stacked from parts of the UI references. Guide
“Hand this off”	Scoped files for your coding tools. Guide
“Build it, then critique it”	Build, screenshot, grade, top 3 fixes. Guide
“Put it in FigJam”	The board rebuilt in FigJam through the Figma MCP (Pro). Guide

No plugin?

Without the plugin (for example in ChatGPT or Windsurf) the tools still work, and the playbooks still come from the server through the get_playbook tool. Paste this once at the start of the chat so your agent asks for them:

Use the GoBanana tools. Before you start, call get_playbook with name
gobanana-explore and follow it exactly. When it names another playbook, call
get_playbook for it. Show every reference with its source link.
Never download or copy images.