Sources
Playbooks, guidelines, books, and courses we trust, separate from the course shelf.
Playbooks and guidelines for practice; Books for depth; Repos and labs for hands-on learning; Papers for theory.
Recently updated
Playbooks
Practical guides and frameworks for AI UX practice
A Guide for Designing with AI
GitLab's product-designer guidance for AI uncertainty: happy and unhappy paths, engagement guidelines, and validation with variable LLM output. Free public handbook.
AI UX Playground
Large catalog of patterns, demos, and teardowns. Worth skimming for breadth and inspiration.
AX Pattern Library
16 free patterns for designing agentic experiences. Practical guidance for designing agent interactions.
Carbon for AI
IBM Carbon's guidance for AI surfaces. Grounded in an existing design system, so it reads as production rules rather than theory.
Design by Intelligence
ADPList's design-and-AI learning path. Practical free material for designers building judgment around AI tools.
Expose your design system to LLMs
Guide to making design systems LLM-readable through structured specs, closed token layers, and automated auditing.
HAX Toolkit
Microsoft's Human-AI Experience toolkit: guidelines, patterns, and worksheets for designing AI interactions with production discipline.
People + AI Guidebook
Practical patterns for people-centered AI from Google's PAIR team. Still one of the clearest free baselines for product and research designers.
Guidelines
Design system and interaction guidelines for AI interfaces
Agent Experience (AX)
Guidelines for designing agent experiences. Focused on the interaction layer between humans and AI agents.
Agent Skills
Open standard for packaging agent skills in SKILL.md format, enabling cross-platform capability sharing.
Agentic Design UI/UX patterns
UI/UX pattern collection for agentic experiences. Focused on interaction fundamentals.
AI interaction guidelines
Atlassian's Rovo UI AI interaction guidelines. Concrete rules for how AI shows up in product UI, useful beyond the Atlassian stack.
Building effective agents
Anthropic's guide to building effective agents. Covers architecture patterns and best practices.
Claude Fable prompting: Writing density
Anthropic's prompt engineering guidance on controlling prose density and avoiding mannered writing in Claude Fable 5.1.
Cursor Rules
Official docs on project and user rules so agents follow specs and standards instead of one-off chat.
Design for agents
Microsoft's design guidelines for agent experiences. Clear framing for goals, handoff, and trust when the product acts on a user's behalf.
Generative Loaders
Free generative loader and motion patterns for product UI, useful when AI states need polish without looking generic.
llms.txt
Standard for making documentation LLM-friendly. Simple convention for better AI-readable content.
Machine learning HIG
Apple's HIG chapter on machine learning. Concise platform expectations for suggestions, predictions, and when to stay quiet.
Practical guide to building AI agents
OpenAI's practical guide for building AI agents. Technical patterns and implementation guidance.
Responsible agentic AI guidelines
Salesforce's framework for responsible agentic AI. Covers trust, safety, and governance patterns.
Shape of AI
Free AI UX pattern library covering Wayfinders, Prompt actions, Tuners, Governors, Trust builders, and Identifiers. Clear, actionable building blocks.
Free courses
Free learning resources and structured courses
AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations
Free Anthropic fluency foundations. Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence. Take before the creative-work track on the shelf.
AI for UI
Course by Emil Kowalski on using AI to help build interfaces people want to use. Separate from his GitHub skills pack already on the shelf.
ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers
Short free DeepLearning.AI + OpenAI prompting course. Developer-leaning notebooks; still useful for designers who script research and content loops.
Design with AI
Free sprint-based product-design course using Cursor + Claude Code + Figma. Course is free; Claude Pro is a paid tool dependency.
Generative AI for Everyone
Andrew Ng's GenAI overview for non-experts. Video path is broadly accessible; graded accomplishments lean on the Pro plan, check current access.
Article series
In-depth writing and multi-part explorations
Agent UX patterns
Practical agent UX pattern write-ups from HatchWorks. Skim when you need concrete interaction patterns for agent products, filed as a series-style reference.
Beyond Generative: Agentic AI and user-centric design
Opener in Victor Yocco's Smashing series on agentic AI UX: research playbooks, autonomy modes, trust metrics, and design against deception. Read as a series, not a one-off.
Designing AI Products and Features: Study Guide
NN/g's reading path for designing AI products and features. Useful when you want a structured article stack instead of a paid cohort.
Secrets of Agentic UX
Emerging design patterns for human interaction with AI agents. Explores the craft of agentic UX.
UX design for agents
A Microsoft Design essay on UX for agents, companion thinking to the Learn guidelines, more narrative than checklist.
UX patterns for agentic AI
A guided collection of UX patterns for agentic AI. Useful series-style reference when you are mapping controls, handoffs, and agent surfaces.
Labs
Interactive labs and hands-on experiments
PAIR AI Explorables
Interactive explorations of AI concepts and behaviors. Playful, hands-on learning from Google PAIR.
PAIR Guidebook Codelab
Hands-on codelab companion to the PAIR Guidebook. Work through exercises if you learn better by doing than by reading alone.
Books
Books that deepen AI product / UX judgment
AI and UX
Why artificial intelligence needs user experience. Apress book covering the parallel histories and frameworks.
Conversational Design
Essential guide to making systems feel conversational. From A Book Apart, by the master of research-driven design.
Designing Agentive Technology
Rosenfeld book on designing systems that act on our behalf. Foundational read for agentic UX.
Designing Human-Centric AI Experiences
Akshay Kore on designing human-centric AI experiences. Practical product/UX framing for AI features that stay usable and trustworthy.
Human-Centered AI
Ben Shneiderman's case for human-centered AI: reliable, safe, and trustworthy systems with people firmly in control. Foundational judgment reading.
Interface Craft
Paid membership library for designing with uncommon care. 40+ articles, walkthroughs, interactive demos, skill files, and tools organized into thematic collections. Free sample content available.
Interfaces
Paid magazine exploring interface patterns and design principles. Regular deep dives into craft.
Sentient Design: Crafting Intelligent Interfaces with AI
Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred on AI as design material, intelligent, adaptive interfaces and the Sentient Triangle. For designers and product leaders who want judgment, not another tool course.
The Anticipatory Design Playbook
Joana Cerejo's UX guide to designing AI-driven, anticipatory experiences. For designers who want a structured playbook, not another tool tutorial.
Repos
Hands in the machinery, open packs and agent skills to clone and run
agent-skills
Agent skills collection from Maxime Podgorski. Open pack to clone and adapt for design-engineering agent setups.
agentic-design-system
Early open work on an agentic design system. Useful signal of where component language for agents might go.
AI Elements
Vercel's AI SDK Elements. React components for building AI interfaces.
AI Interaction Atlas
Shared language and pattern atlas for designing and communicating AI interaction experiences.
assistant-ui
React component library for building AI assistants. Production-ready components and patterns.
Awesome AI Evaluations Tools
Curated list of AI evaluation frameworks and tools covering agents, MCP, and multimodal systems.
designpowers
Open collection of design powers and patterns for AI-era product work. Skim when you want community-built references.
Ethical Design Box
Free set of 21 ethical design methods as AI skills plus an orchestrating agent, for use at decision time.
generative-ui
CopilotKit's generative UI repo. Hands-on reference for builders pairing agents with generative interface patterns.
HyperFrames
HTML to video for agents. Convert web interfaces to video content programmatically.
Impeccable
Design vocabulary for AI coding agents, tokens, critique, polish, and writing that keep interfaces on-brand instead of sloppy.
intent
Open repo exploring intent-centered design for AI. Good for reading source and patterns, not a polished curriculum.
Libraries.dev
High-craft React UI effect libraries for AI agents (beams, orbs, gooey, metal, image loaders). Free MIT packages with pasteable agent prompts.
skills (emilkowalski)
Skill pack for designers and engineers, animation taste, UI judgment, and agent guidance drawn from Vercel and Linear craft.
skills (MengTo)
Meng To's agent skills pack for design and build workflows. Clone when you want taste-oriented skills in your agent stack.
Spec Kit
Open toolkit for spec-driven development with coding agents. Constitution, specify, plan, tasks, implement.
UI Skills
Curated design-engineering skills for agents (CLI and MCP). Routes UI work to focused skills for craft, motion, audits, and anti-generic interfaces.
ux-ui-agent-skills
UX/UI-oriented agent skills from plugin87. Handy when your coding agent needs design-aware prompts and checks.
Papers
Papers that deepen the stack
A User Experience 3.0 (UX 3.0) Paradigm Framework
UX 3.0 paradigm framework for designing human-centered AI experiences. Useful when you want a structured research lens beyond pattern lists.
AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual Taxonomy, Applications and Challenges
Taxonomy distinguishing modular AI agents from orchestrated agentic AI systems with persistent memory and multi-agent collaboration.
AI Concept Envisioning Toolkit (Value–Harm)
RtD toolkit (AI Capability Library, 24 Value–Harm Cards, Value–Tension Map) to juxtapose values and harms in early AI concept work. Free research + Figma toolkit.
Design Principles for Human-Agent Interaction
Research position paper synthesizing 14 HCI design principles for human-agent interaction across four stages (initially, during interaction, over time, when things go wrong), with heuristic evaluation of nine agent systems.
Designing The Internet of Agents (HAX)
Framework paper on trustworthy, transparent, collaborative human-agent interaction (HAX) for an Internet of Agents. Theory companion to applied HAX tooling.
Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineering
Review of LLM agent architecture through externalization: memory, skills, protocols, and harness as coordination layer.
Guidelines for Human-AI Interaction
Canonical CHI 2019 guidelines for human-AI interaction from Amershi et al. Still the baseline paper behind much of today's AI UX guidance.
Interaction-Augmented Instruction: Modeling the Synergy of Prompts and Interactions in Human-GenAI Collaboration
Entity-relation graph model (IAI) formalizing how GUI interactions combine with text prompts to enhance human-GenAI communication. Distills twelve atomic interaction paradigms for designing GenAI interfaces. CHI '26.
Mixed-Initiative Context
Structuring and managing context for human-AI collaboration in mixed-initiative systems. Read when context handoff is your product problem.
Principles of mixed-initiative user interfaces
Foundational paper on mixed-initiative interaction. Still grounds the theory for AI UX decades later.
Who to follow
People shaping the craft of AI UX and tools for thought
Amelia Wattenberger
Data visualization, generative UI, and thoughtful explorations of what LLMs change about interface design.
Geoffrey Litt
Researcher at Ink & Switch exploring malleable software, end-user programming, and AI-augmented tools.
Ink & Switch
Research lab exploring the future of software. Malleable systems, local-first software, and thoughtful computing.
Linus Lee
Builder, thinker, and explorer of tools for thought. Experiments with language models and personal computing.
Luke Wroblewski
Product design veteran exploring AI interfaces, input methods, and where conversation meets interaction design.
Maggie Appleton
Anthropology of computing, visual explanations, and the craft of making complex ideas clear.
What’s worth it this month
Short notes on AI UX courses, sources, and articles worth your time. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.