You may not know it, but as a product designer, you most likely have been designing for products that use some form of artificial intelligence. — Specifically, these products are working within the first stage of AI, artificial narrow intelligence. We, designers, play a key role in shaping how AI will develop. We already have the necessary skills to push it forward. My next post will touch on how design makes AI smarter.

I’ve designed two chatbot products in the last 1.5 years. The first was smart and slow. The second is not as smart but fast. Both intend to be smart and fast. I’ll get to the benefits, drawbacks, and design decisions for both. In 2015, with a team of <10 people…

Do you want to innovate the present or create the future? — I was introduced to future-making by Alisa Leonard (#ToTheFuture) and and Paul Kuhn at Northside Festival this year. I realized at that moment that “innovation” is the norm, not the future.

Sell like you would in real life — Last year, I was part of a startup that created one of the first, if not the first, office assistant bot on Slack.* Majority of my design career previously was spent in the e-commerce space with a heavy focus on conversion. Naturally, when I started working on bot conversations I…

I’ve always thought of myself as being lucky. — Lucky to have been born in America. Lucky to have been raised in the SF Bay Area. Lucky to have my education paid for. Lucky to feel taken care of. But, it wasn’t luck. My parents, since before I was born and still now, work 7 days a week, 15…

One great thing about making requests through our personal bot, Large, is that you can multi-task. You will not be told you took too long to make a decision so now you’ll need to tell me all over again what you’re looking for. But during this waiting period, the assistant…

Of course people asked Large for illegal things. People said things that they probably tried on Siri in the middle of the night. It was natural to ask for pizza then, “ABORT” when it became too real. People also asked Large to perform tasks that perhaps a service like Meekan…

When I joined Assembly as a product designer, we were working on a platform that brought designers, engineers, product managers, and whoever together to build digital products. Design was in the form of interfaces for writing, posting, showing appreciation, commenting, and displaying data. Then, shift happened. I started my design…