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The era of unbounded products: Designing for Multimodal IO: Ben Hylak
Takeaway
Win at AI product design by imposing app-specific structure — hierarchy, familiarity, surfacing — on top of the unbounded chat/multimodal canvas.
Summary
- Hylak (Dawn founder, ex-Apple Vision Pro designer) frames AI products as 'unbounded' — users can type, talk, show images, plead, bargain — making capabilities unclear and adoption rely on word-of-mouth.
- Three Vision OS design lessons applied to AI: highlight what matters fast (home screen surfaces apps/people/environments), enforce hierarchy (windows with bounds), leverage familiarity (TV app looks like tvOS).
- Good present patterns: Dot extracts structured timelines per person from chat; Perplexity formats query+sources+answer like a search engine, not a chat. Anti-pattern: Vercel chatbot demo's ephemeral inline UI sliders that drift away in scroll.
- Argues product designers must add structure to tame the unbounded chaos, with structure unique to each product giving it purpose.
ai-uxdesignmultimodal
Original description
Everything is converging. ai models can now natively understand the same modalities as you. at the same time, AR technology is getting to a place where we are able to experience virtual worlds like never before. how did we get here, where is this going, and how do we build intuitive experiences in the age of unbounded products. Recorded live in San Francisco at the AI Engineer World's Fair. See the full schedule of talks at https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2024/schedule & join us at the AI Engineer World's Fair in 2025! Get your tickets today at https://ai.engineer/2025