ai-product-design

AI Product Design

Design the human-system relationship. The experience must help users understand capability, judge output quality, correct errors, and retain control over consequences.

1. Test whether AI belongs

Define:

• user goal and current workflow;
• value AI may add: speed, scale, synthesis, prediction, personalization, or automation;
• deterministic alternative and why it is insufficient;
• acceptable error, latency, cost, and review burden;
• affected people, data, objects, and downstream actions;
• business outcome and user outcome;
• evidence needed to continue investing.

Do not invent organization policy, retention, approval roles, architecture, quality thresholds, or launch percentages. Mark recommended controls as proposals and assign unresolved values to the accountable product, policy, security, legal, data, or engineering owner.

Prefer deterministic interaction when rules are stable, correctness must be exact, or users can complete the task faster without probabilistic behavior.

2. Map capability and risk

Read references/capability-risk-and-trust.md. Create:

Task | AI role | Inputs and sources | Expected quality | Failure modes | Consequence | Human control | Escalation

Separate suggestion, drafting, classification, recommendation, and execution. A system that can generate a plan does not automatically have permission to carry it out.

3. Select the interaction form

Use this decision map:

Task condition | Interaction form | Required controls

• local text, data, or design transformation | inline assistance | preview, compare, accept, reject, undo;
• known parameters and repeatable output | structured controls | defaults, constraints, validation, editable inputs;
• bounded choice among options | recommendation with evidence | ranked options, source links, tradeoffs, dismiss;
• ambiguous or iterative intent | conversational interaction | active scope, context window, correction, history;
• repeated review and approval | batch workflow | queue, status, bulk actions, item-level override;
• multi-step action across systems | agentic workflow | permission, preview, approval, execution log, verification, undo.