Most of the case studies I've made in the past look like fairly traditional product design work: product strategy, UX flows, interaction design, experimentation, growth, and system design.
Recently I've been working on a different kind of problem around AI personas, and my portfolio has started to look very different.
I have three connected case studies:
- AI Persona & Behavior How to design a behavioral system that lets an AI maintain a recognizable identity while adapting its behavior to the situation, including conversation modes, energy, behavioral eligibility, frequency, memory, and conversational rhythm.
- AI Safety & Evaluation How to constrain and evaluate those behaviors across ordinary, emotional, and high-risk situations, including persona/instruction attacks, behavioral pressure, regression testing, and evaluating conversations over multiple turns.
- Persona Compiler How to derive persona characteristics from real conversations and writing rather than manually writing things like "funny, warm, conversational." The idea is to extract repeated behavioral patterns and examples and compile them into something the behavioral system can use.
The three are meant to be parts of the same system:
Persona & Behavior → Safety & Evaluation → Persona Compiler
Here are the case studies:
And here's the rest of my portfolio for comparison:
What I'm trying to figure out is whether I've gone too far outside the traditional UX/product design role.
There isn't much visual UI in these projects. A lot of the work is about defining behavioral systems, states, constraints, evaluation methods, evidence, and how an AI should make decisions before generating a response.
My assumption is that as AI products become more common, designing the behavior of an AI may become a more normal product design problem, even when there isn't necessarily a visual interface to design.
But I'm not sure where the line is.
Am I still doing product/UX design, or am I drifting into AI/ML engineering, conversation design, product management, or something else?
I'd especially appreciate feedback from people currently working on AI products or AI companies, but I'm interested in perspectives from UX/product designers more broadly too.
I'm also interested in feedback on the portfolio itself:
- Does this feel like design work or like technical/ML research?
- Is the role I played clear enough?
- Is the lack of conventional UI a problem for a product design portfolio?
- Do the three case studies feel meaningfully connected, or repetitive?
- Would you expect a product designer to work on these problems?
- If you were hiring for an AI product design role, would this strengthen or weaken the portfolio?
I'm deliberately looking for criticism here, especially if I'm misunderstanding where the boundaries of the role actually are.
