Smashing Newsletter: Issue #533

Editorial

In the noisy and polluted world today, trust doesn’t come for free. It doesn’t emerge by default. It must be earned and meticulously preserved — by being reliable, accountable, and treating customers with respect. This holds true for people, but it also holds true for software.

In this newsletter, we look at design patterns for building trust — with useful guidelines and pointers to more trustworthy and reliable AI experiences, and how to orchestrate them. And if you’d like to dive deeper, we have a whole video library on design patterns for AI as well.

As always, we have a good number of friendly online workshops to finish this year off strong:

Why You Will Not Be Replaced by AI (Nov 19, free!)
Smashing Meets Accessibility (Dec 10, free!)

Smashing Meets Accessibility — Join us on December 10 at 8–11 AM PT. Tickets are free for our community, so why not join and spread the love!

Theming Design Systems (Dec 1–15)
How To Measure UX and Design Impact (Dec 1–12)
The New CSS Toolkit (Dec 3–17)
Figma Workflow Masterclass (Dec 10–16, early-bird tickets available!)

Thanks for being smashing! 🧡 Happy designing, everyone!

— Vitaly

1. Building Trust In AI Products

Am I chatting with AI or a human being? Can I trust this AI-generated answer? What are the sources? AI products are super powerful, but as designers, we need to be extra careful to ensure that users have the confidence not only that the product works reliably but also in alignment with their personal goals and values. So, how can we achieve that? How to design AI products that people can trust?

Trustworthy AI Products: Essential UX Patterns

Anyi Sun and Andrea Nguyen from KoiStudios published a helpful PDF guide on exactly that. It explores the psychology of trust and highlights ten essential UX patterns for building trust in AI products, along with real-world examples for each pattern. Short and sweet tips to help you integrate trust-building elements into the user experience. (cm)

2. Trust-Building UX Patterns

Trust is a fundamental human need. As users, we want to feel safe and secure when we use a product or service. We want to be sure that we are in control and that our data and privacy are protected. It’s that feeling of trust that can set a product apart from the competition.

The team at IF published a useful design patterns catalogue with UX patterns that help teams design trustworthy services. It shines a light on more than 60 patterns across six categories: understanding and influencing decisions, signing in, giving and removing consent, giving access to data, getting access to data, and doing security checks. Each pattern not only comes with a short summary of why it matters, but also a list of advantages, limitations, and examples. (cm)

3. UI For AI

With AI here to stay, user interfaces need to evolve. So, what could this look like? What could a UI look like that is optimized for AI-powered products, while going beyond the chatbot text box? Dan Saffer works with a group of students to explore exactly that. He shares insights into the group’s ongoing work in a series of blog posts.

The goal of “UI for AI,” as the project is called, is to find new ways of making the unique capabilities of AI understandable and more useful. By now, the group has created low-fidelity prototypes for recurring concepts that structure the user experience when interacting with generative models, among them memory handling, context switching, conversation flow, blank canvas, and refinement. Interesting ideas are guaranteed. (cm)

4. AI Interaction Patterns

How are designers responding to the challenges that AI brings along? When Emily Campbell started consulting teams on AI and product strategy, she noticed how inconsistent the existing experiences were. Companies are prioritizing “doing AI” but struggling to gracefully integrate it into their current products, so her observation. To help designers make AI feel familiar and straightforward for users, Emily created The Shape of AI.

The Shape of AI is a growing collection of AI interaction patterns that rely on proven human interaction and cognition frameworks. They cover everything from identifiers for distinguishing AI content to trust indicators for controlling the response and assessing its accuracy. A great reminder that although our interfaces may evolve due to the rise of AI, the foundations of good design are more relevant than ever. (cm)

5. IBM Design For AI Guidelines

With all the excitement surrounding AI, it’s tempting to rush to create something that takes advantage of these powerful new capabilities. To design for AI in a way that really benefits our users, we shouldn’t skip a crucial step, though: We need to reconsider our design considerations to account for this new kind of human/machine relationship. IBM’s Design for AI guide provides a solid foundation you can build upon.

Design for AI explores what designing for a system that can understand, reason, learn, and interact encompasses. It shines a light on design factors for AI, what is required to design authentic AI-based relationships, and the ethical implications involved. A thought-provoking read to get into the AI mindset. (cm)

6. Designing Loops, Not Paths

Historically, software design has followed workflow-based methodologies, breaking down objectives into a sequence of tasks to achieve a desired outcome. Like a script that is followed until the goal is met. However, as we all know, real life rarely follows a script. It is unpredictable and much messier than a linear process suggests. With recent advancements in AI, we now have an expanded range of design possibilities that allow us to better adapt to this complexity.

Matt Fick and Max Peterschmidt, Senior UX Architect and Principal User Researcher for Business & Industry Copilot at Microsoft, introduce a design practice that embraces the messiness of real life: loops. Instead of following a rigid, step-by-step workflow, loops operate as continuous cycles of sensing, deciding, and making adjustments until the goal is reached. A holistic approach that empowers people to better navigate the real world with all its unpredictability. (cm)

7. Meet Accessible UX Research, A Brand-New Smashing Book 📚

In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. For our newest book, we have teamed up with Dr. Michele A. Williams: Meet “Accessible UX Research.”

“Accessible UX Research” is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Print edition shipping Fall 2025. eBook also available for download in Fall 2025. Pre-order the book, and save off the full price.

That’s All, Folks!

Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!

This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).

November 11, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #533

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