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Alex Cornell is a design director at Meta, where he leads design on Muse, Meta’s consumer AI agent. He came to the role with a long background in software product design, including time as a founder, and has spent the past year building one of the most thoughtful agent interfaces in the consumer AI space. Muse ships with a custom avatar, a three-layer status display, a personalized ideas surface, and a generative feed. Alex has been sharing the reasoning behind each of those design decisions publicly on Threads. Listen or watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts What you’ll learn: - Why Alex built Muse to feel like messaging, not an AI app - How Muse’s three-layer status system accommodates different levels of technical expertise - What generative UI actually means in a shipped consumer product - How Alex turned years of forgotten Instagram saves into a daily shopping catalog - Why his mom apologized to her Muse, and what it means for AI design - How he uses Muse to track his golf game, shot by shot, as he works toward a single-digit handicap - The mindset shift designers need when the output is never pixel-perfect - When to use the main chat versus a side chat, and where the architecture still falls short Brought to you by: WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Welcome and guest intro (02:50) Designing Muse (05:33) Choosing which primitives to surface: characters, ideas, feed (08:50) Speed of model and response times (11:01) Generative UI and personalization (14:25) SkyMall demo: Instagram saves turned into a shopping catalog (17:16) Shopping, monitoring, and price alerts with Muse (19:07) Instagram and Pinterest connectors for visual data (21:40) Golf use case: round recaps, shot data, practice breakdowns (25:28) Main chat versus side chats (27:56) Old blog turned morning podcast: 20 years of posts via the Wayback Machine (29:39) Chess dashboard: game analysis with a snarky coach (30:59) What designers need to learn for AI, and what still works (34:33) Prompting strategy when Muse is being obstinate (36:31) Where to find Alex Tools referenced: • Meta Muse: https://muse.ai Other references: • The Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com • Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com • Chess.com: https://www.chess.com • SkyMall/Sharper Image aesthetic: https://www.skymall.com Where to find Alex Cornell: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alex-cornell-5449a99 Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].
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