AI product teams are building boards, not games. The UX Collective piece 'The Board is Not the Game' argues that shipping polished components, cards, and screens is not the same as designing a coherent product experience. The distinction matters: you can have every piece in place and still have nothing that works as a whole.
The core provocation is structural. Most AI product design stops at the artifact level, the interface, the prompt input, the output card, and never addresses the rules of engagement that make those pieces meaningful to a user. That gap between component design and experience design is where AI products are currently failing.
The full piece is worth reading for how it frames this as a systemic design failure, not a polish problem. If your team is iterating on UI while users still cannot figure out what the product is actually for, this article names exactly why.
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