What’s wrong with AI UX in 2025

Published in

Bootcamp

4 min readFeb 6, 2025

An illustrated title card showing a cartoon robot flailing its arms. Title reads AI UX in 2025. Five-or-so thoughts for consideration, presented in TECHNICOLOR.

That AI is so hot right now. I just worry maybe people aren’t talking about it enough, you know? Anyway I wanted to start 2025 by sharing some thoughts on whats good and bad about AI UX as we head into a new year. A toddler and a four month old made that apparently impossible until now, but here they are anyway…

An illustrated section title with a character waving jazz hands. Title reads ‘AI should not have main character energy’ — It’s a sidekick not a star.

1. AI Should Not Have Main Character Energy

With the exception of the AI hype crowd, nobody opens an AI tool thinking, “I can’t wait to have a deep, introspective dialogue with this machine.” They do it because they have something to get done. AI should be the supporting cast, not the lead — the stagehand, not the star.

It should enhance workflows, not hijack them, adapting to what people need instead of forcing them into a rigid and predefined interaction model. In fact, AI should be as un-opinionated as possible about its interaction model. The more it gets out of the way — instead of defaulting to a generic chat interface that tries to be a Swiss Army knife but ends up perfect for almost nothing — the better.

Don’t make the tool the focus. Make it disappear into the flow of the work. The best AI is the one you barely notice at all.

An illustrated title with a cartoon brain and lighbulb. Title reads: ‘Mental models are everything’ — AI should work with my brain, not fight it.

2. Mental Models are Everything

It’s about persistent information, trackable iteration, and the ability to make specific, targeted adjustments with repeatable results. Stability in variation is crucial for professional workflows — especially in creative fields, but also in finance, research, engineering — pretty much anywhere that matters.

The next generation of AI tools will be defined by how well they fit human mental models for how tasks should be accomplished. And guess what? That almost never means a linear chat thread.

Too much context, information, and detail gets lost in a sea of text. Recall is hard. We shouldn’t be making users juggle context in their heads — AI should be handling it for them.

An illustrated section title showing a hammer character squishing a chat bubble. Title reads: ‘Chat ain’t it chief!’ — It’s 2025, we can do better than a pattern that peaked with MSN messenger’.

3. Chat Ain’t It Chief

We’ve entered the era of intent-based interaction, yet somehow, most AI tools still feel like they’re Clippy on steroids.

Jakob Nielsen — legend that he is — is bang on when he says this isn’t just an upgrade to old UI models. It’s a fundamentally new interaction paradigm.

But right now, that paradigm is still mostly reduced to a single blinking cursor in a chatbox.

Where are the spatial UIs, multimodal tools, and interactive canvases that actually fit the way people work? The good news is we’re starting to see experimentation in this space. The bad news? We’re only just scratching the surface.

Chat has its place as a natural language input pattern, but let’s be real — it’s just one tool in the box.

An illustrated section title showing a pencil character freaking out about a sausage taking an xray. Title reads: ‘Show your working’ — If you don’t know how it got to the answer, how can you trust it?

4. Show Your Working

AI should expose its chain of logic. I want to see why it spat out that result, how I can nudge it in the right direction, and where I can adjust its decision-making.

Explainability isn’t just about trust — it’s about making AI useful.

(See also: Explainable AI (XAI) — a key principle in unlocking value, usability, and adoption in creative industries and beyond.)

Oh, and let’s not forget the sexiest of topics —

An illustration of the word ‘Auditability!’

Because in a world of stolen IP, generative content, and fake news, being able to track provenance is going to be table stakes for intellectual property, accountability, and avoiding straight-up propaganda.

An illustrated section title showing a playing card king of clubs character standing proud. Title reads: ‘Context is king’ — Welll actually King, Queen, Ace, Joke, the lot.

5. Context is King

AI that understands what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how to make itself actually useful? That’s the dream.

Nobody needs AI that feels like an overeager intern who just skimmed the first page of a report and thinks they’ve nailed it.

Sure, one day AI may be sufficiently advanced that all we need is an adequate description of intent, and the machine will figure out the rest. But today is not that day.

Until then, while we still need to trust, and be able to effectively manipulate AI tools, we need a lot more power packed into the user interface and interaction model.

The Inevitable Conclusion

We’re at the start of what could be a golden age of creativity, productivity, and all-around brilliance — but we’re not there yet. And there are so many ways we can still get in our own way.

Like my first Creative Director used to say before a pitch (lovingly):

“Don’t fuck it up, kids.”