The era of unbounded products: Designing for Multimodal IO: Ben Hylak
Sep 25, 2024 · 20:32
Ben Hylak, founder of Dawn and former Apple Vision Pro designer, argues that the key to building intuitive AI products in the era of unbounded interfaces is adding structure—highlighting what matters, establishing hierarchy, and leveraging familiarity—lessons from designing VisionOS. He shows how successful AI apps like Dot, Perplexity, and Claude use structure (e.g., Claude pulling code into artifacts) while the Vercel chatbot's inline dynamic UI is an anti-pattern because it disrupts conversation flow. For agents, spreadsheets (like Clay) make unfamiliar multi-step tasks familiar. Looking ahead, Hylak predicts less prompt engineering via sparse autoencoders for millions of ranked, personalized presets, shifting product evaluation from evals to user analytics as apps become increasingly personalized.
