What are the design principles for intelligent interfaces?

Designers use principles like unity, balance, and contrast to guide user attention in traditional interfaces, but what are the principles for designing "intelligent" interfaces?

Josh Clark, Veronika Kindred, and Kritika Yadav may have cracked the code.

When we work with a new design material like AI, sometimes practitioners make parallel discoveries in totally different domains.

And this is what I’ve seen with Josh, Veronika, and Kritika as we’ve prepared for Designing wtih AI 2025.

Kritika specializes in conversation design, and she’s been working with her team to build a better shopping assistant.  In her research, she found that traditional chatbots offer a frustrating experience for shoppers because of bad assumptions and “20-questions” style guesswork. Her team solved this by building an LLM framework that mimics the approach of a skilled salesperson–better understanding context and intent, and acting as more of a guide than a bot.

These same principles emerge in Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred’s exploration of non-text interfaces. In their demo, they invite users to “describe a scene and watch it come to life.” Through playful instructions like “Be a goldfish,” the colors and animations of a digital scene change to mimic the look and feel of a lazy orange fish in blue waters.

Like Kritika, Josh and Veronika call out the importance of understanding context and intent, because that’s what allows you to infer colors and animations from an evocative prompt. They also highlight the importance of guidance, because this is what makes intelligent interfaces simple to use.

Shopping assistant vs. playful animations.

Text vs. visuals.

Two totally different approaches, but these parallel explorations demonstrate big overarching principles that all interaction designers should be thinking about as we work on the frontier of AI.

You can hear more from Josh, Veronika, and Kritika (including the rest of the principles they discovered) at Designing wtih AI 2025.

Have you noticed other places where these intelligent design principles are showing up?