It’s about the future of AI products, and your career depends on getting this right.
Fellow designers, we need to talk. While we’ve been perfecting our Figma prototypes and debating micro-interactions, the entire AI industry has sleepwalked into the biggest UX design failure of our careers. And worse? We’re all complicit.
As Product Designers and Chiefs of Design (or Head of UX, whatever you call yourself), we pride ourselves on solving complex user problems through thoughtful interaction design. Yet somehow, when it comes to AI products, we’ve collectively abandoned our design principles and defaulted to the laziest possible solution: chat boxes everywhere.
The great chat box scam
Every AI product looks identical now, and that should terrify you.
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Manus,… open any AI product and you’ll see the same tired interface: a message box at the bottom, chat bubbles, sidebar history. Twelve major platforms with nearly identical interfaces. This isn’t user-centered design; it’s design abdication.