design strategy - Adjacent

Jul 3

Why Every AI Feature Shouldn't Be A Chatbot

Source: Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

The design community's reflexive turn to conversational interfaces for every AI use case is a strategic mistake—not every user intent benefits from dialogue, and forcing chat where structured inputs or visual outputs make sense creates friction instead of value. Designers building AI products need to match modality to actual user goals: sometimes that's text generation, sometimes it's classification or real-time visualization, and sometimes the LLM should be invisible infrastructure rather than the interface itself. Success goes to teams that pick the right tool for each moment in the user journey, not those with the most sophisticated chatbots.

theme-brand design strategy ai integration gtm approach

Jun 19

Google's AI Design Framework Skips the Hardest Question

Source: Sorted Pixels

Google's internal AI design playbook—a document that has shaped industry conversation for years—omits guidance on when *not* to use AI, leaving companies without a decision framework for the moments that matter most. This gap is particularly costly for brands trying to differentiate: without guardrails on where AI should sit in customer experience, teams default to adding it everywhere, creating the bland, generic digital products now visible across industries. The missing chapter isn't about capability. It's about restraint and judgment.