Problem
Two new problems with no pattern to copy
How do you design an AI chat experience people will actually trust, rather than treat as a black box they have to fact-check somewhere else? In a regulated industry, a confident-sounding answer with no provenance costs more to verify than it saves.
The second problem looked unrelated at first. Our AI features all sat behind a single global switch a PM had to flip manually — feature by feature, week after week — just to manage beta access. Neither problem had an existing UI pattern to borrow.
Process
Attribution as an interface, not a footnote
For AI chat, the design problem wasn’t the conversation UI — that part is becoming a solved pattern industry-wide. It was trust: making it obvious that an answer was actually grounded in the user’s own documents, not hallucinated. I designed source attribution directly into the chat experience, so verification is part of reading the answer rather than a separate step someone has to remember to take.
For the feature switch, I didn’t start with implementation. I prototyped the concept first, specifically to get PM, design and engineering aligned on the right approach before any real engineering time got spent — replacing the single global toggle with granular, per-feature access.
People don’t want less AI. They want to know where the answer came from, and to decide how much of it they’re signing up for.
Technical depth
What the work actually involved
- Designed and built AI chat with inline source attribution, tying generated answers back to their originating documents.
- Replaced a global feature flag with granular per-feature toggles, giving users self-serve access instead of manual PM intervention.
- Built our first real AI-powered search experience in the product — another zero-to-one UI problem with no internal precedent.
Outcome
The chat experience gives users a built-in way to verify AI output instead of trusting it blindly, and the feature switch redesign eliminated a recurring manual workflow entirely. Both shipped as genuinely new patterns, not adaptations of something that already existed.