Design for the AI Age

One way I visualize this relationship between the form of traditional UI and the function of AI is through the metaphor of a ‘workbench’. Just as a carpenter's workbench is familiar and purpose-built, providing an organized environment for tools and materials, a well-designed interface can create productive context for AI interactions. Rather than ... See more

A chat interface is a very weak and generic form. It’s a simple container for conversations back and forth, which is a start, but it isn’t precise, and it doesn’t effectively integrate with the rest of the tools and systems a team is using.

Prompting is essentially like writing a spec, sometimes it's hard to articulate exactly what you want and ultimately control the outcome. Two people looking for the same thing might get wildly different results just based on how they asked for it, which creates an unprecedented level of dynamism within the product.

One way I visualize this relationship between the form of traditional UI and the function of AI is through the metaphor of a ‘workbench’. Just as a carpenter's workbench is familiar and purpose-built, providing an organized environment for tools and materials, a well-designed interface can create productive context for AI interactions. Rather than ... See more

I believe a better option is to build a functional application with a more traditional UI and then complement it with AI functions.

We’re likely going to have to reinvent our design processes – working forward to understand capabilities, rather than backwards from user needs.

But we face a fundamental tension in that AI sort of breaks our usual way of designing things, working back from function, and shaping the form.

Form acts as a way to set the context – like the way an axe looks and feels in your hand, you get an immediate sense of its purpose.

This shift from deterministic traditional UI to something more unbridled raises a challenge for designers: with no predictable journeys to optimize, how do you create consistent, high-quality experiences?