January 21, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #491
This newsletter issue was sent out to 192,168 subscribers on Tuesday, January 21, 2025.
Editorial
Do you remember the very first time you used ChatGPT back in 2022? To many of us, that first experience felt incredibly magical — almost as if we were speaking to super-intelligence on the other side of the text box.
AI has evolved massively since then; from the exploding number of parameters and growing context windows (“memory” that LLMs can refer to during conversation) to audio and video processing with RAG, reasoning engines, GEO, and even agentic systems.
With these advancements, major concerns became even more prevalent: ethical concerns, privacy issues, security challenges, and severe environmental impact on the computing and cooling of all the data centers.
So, what’s the state of AI in 2025? We’ll look into it in our upcoming online workshop (starting tomorrow!) on Design Patterns For AI Interfaces, and we’ll look into some of the useful pointers in this newsletter as well.
On our end, we’d love to welcome you to our upcoming workshops and conferences in 2025:
- Accessible Typography with Oliver Schöndorfer,
- UX Design Leadership Masterclass with Paul Boag,
- Fixing Frustrating Design Patterns For 2025 by yours truly,
- SmashingConf Freiburg (Sept 8–11, 2025),
- SmashingConf NYC (Oct 6–9, 2025).
And now, let’s dive into what AI can do today!
— Vitaly
1. The Shape Of AI
AI is here to stay. So, how are designers responding to it? 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 different ways of entering prompts and trust indicators for controlling the response and assessing its accuracy. This is 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)
2. Design Patterns For Building Trust
Trust has become a key deciding factor for customers and an essential part of a successful user experience. So, how can we build services that earn trust? The team at strategy and design studio IF created a design patterns catalogue to help teams design trustworthy experiences.
The catalogue describes critical parts of the user experience — from signing into a service to giving and removing consent, granting and gaining access to data, and doing security checks. Each pattern features a short description and an overview of advantages, limitations, and real-world examples. Practical tips that you can apply to your project right away. (cm)
3. How LLMs Work
How do Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT work? While a lot of explanations are either very technical or too trivial, Andreas Stöffelbauer, a Data Scientist at Microsoft, manages to find the sweet spot, explaining LLMs in a way that enables everyone to form their opinion about AI’s potential and risks.
In his comprehensive guide “How Large Language Models Work,” Andreas takes you from zero to understanding how LLMs are trained and why they work so impressively well. To help you get more out of LLMs like ChatGPT, he also shares practical tips you can apply to increase the chances of getting a useful response. A wonderful, intuitive introduction to the topic.
One of the central (but also more complex) aspects of LLMs is Transformers, the neural network architecture that ensures that the LLM can focus attention on what is most relevant in an input sequence. If you want to learn more about how Transformers work in detail, be sure to check out the two videos that Grant Sanderson created. In “Transformers Explained Visually” and “Attention In Transformers, Visually Explained,” he dives deep into Transformers and demystifies their key mechanism: attention. (cm)
4. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Design Patterns for AI Interfaces ux
with Vitaly Friedman. Jan 22 – Feb 5 - New Front-End Adventures, 2025 Edition dev
with Vitaly Friedman. Jan 27 – Feb 10 - Accessible Typography for Web & UI Design Masterclass design
with Oliver Schöndorfer. Feb 10–18 - Building Modern HTML Emails dev
with Rémi Parmentier. Mar 3–11 - The Secrets of Web Performance dev
with Ryan Townsend. May 7–21 - How To Measure UX and Design Impact UX ux
with Vitaly Friedman. Video course + live training - Jump to all workshops →
5. AI-Assisted Workflow
AI tools have made the distance from having an idea to getting out the first functional prototype much shorter. So, how exactly can they make your development workflow more productive? That’s the question Addy Osmani explored in his talk at JSNationUS last November. If you’re up for a deep dive into AI’s impact on software engineering, automating code with agents, and using AI to build components and prototypes and for inspecting and testing a website, this one is for you.
Another great talk that removes the barriers to entry into AI for front-end developers comes from Tejas Kumar. At Pixel Pioneers last year, he explored prompt engineering and shared practical tips on how developers can get the most out of AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, and Cody. Valuable tips that will help you put AI in its rightful place: as your copilot, not replacement. (cm)
6. The Current State Of AI Experiences
Some say AI is more profound than fire or electricity; others consider it meaningless or dumb. The truth is, as so often, somewhere in the middle, as Josh Clark argues. One thing is for sure: AI is changing the user experience, and it’s up to us to figure out a meaningful and responsible way to create AI-mediated experiences.
That’s where Sentient Design comes in. Josh Clark describes it as context- and intent-aware interfaces that can be radically adaptive to user needs. In his article “Sentient Design: AI And The Next Chapter Of UX,” he explains what Sentient Design is all about, exploring the strengths and weaknesses of AI as a new design material and the challenges it brings along for designers.
For an in-depth look into the current landscape of AI-mediated experiences, also be sure to check out Josh’s post “The Shape Of Sentient Design.” In it, he takes a closer look at different archetypes of AI experiences, and he shares the Triangle of Sentient Design, a useful thinking tool that helps us develop ideas and concepts for how AI could address user problems. Two thought-provoking articles on the current state of AI and where it might be heading. (cm)
7. AI Design Patterns And Toolkits
With AI’s superpowers at our fingertips, how can we harness them to create the best experience for our users? Vitaly collected practical guidelines, best practices, templates, and useful resources from all across the web that help us design responsible AI experiences.
The resources come from companies and institutions like Google, Microsoft, IBM, PwC, and the World Economic Forum and provide guidance and design patterns that help us design AI experiences that put humans first. Experiences that remove biases and false assumptions are clear about the decision-making process and give users feedback and control. One for the bookmarks. (cm)
8. Recently Published Books 📚
Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.
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. Have you checked them out already?
- Success at Scale by Addy Osmani
- Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns
- Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober
- Check out all books →
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).
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