Musings on AI UI Design
February 25, 2025
The advent of AI has send UI designers back to the drawing tablet. Tech product designer and blogger Patrick Morgan considers "8 Design Breakthroughs Defining AI’s Future." As when touch-based devices became common, he asserts, design choices made now will shape the ways we interact with technology for years to come. Morgan writes:
"For the first time in over a decade, we’re facing a truly greenfield space in user experience design. There’s no playbook, no established patterns to fall back on. Even the frontier AI labs are learning through experimentation, watching to see what resonates as they introduce new ways to interact. … It’s fascinating to watch these design choices ripple across the ecosystem in real-time. When something works, competitors rush to adopt it — not out of laziness, but because we’re all collectively discovering what makes sense in this new paradigm. In this wild-west moment, new dominant patterns are emerging. Today, I want to highlight the breakthroughs that have captured my imagination the most — the design choices shaping our collective understanding of AI interaction."
The roundup include obvious choices—conversational paradigms like ChatGPT’s interface and voice input systems in general. Morgan also admires integration a la Cursor IDE and Claude Artifacts, and he
appreciates the helpful Grok button alongside content on X. He gives kudos for transparency, like Perplexity’s real-time citations and Deepseek’s process descriptions. Morgan even gives credit to MidJourney for refusing to build its own UI until it had refined its core technology. He reflects:
"These eight breakthroughs aren’t just clever UI decisions — they’re the first chapters in a new story about how humans and machines work together. Each represents a moment when someone dared to experiment, to try something unproven, and found a pattern that resonated."
Yes. And also: Ultimately, AI will be invisible—embedded and out of sight, outputting information. Interfaces undergo constant change by people with time on their hands. UI changes should not distract from the actual trajectory of smart and smarter software. Where do we stand on bias, hallucinations, privacy, and accountability? Those, we believe, are the more pertinent questions. But, sure, UI choices are nifty to observe.
Cynthia Murrell, February 25, 2025
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