Claire Vo · 2 min read · AI & Product
How Meta designed Muse: an AI agent people actually want to talk to | Alex Cornell (Design Director)
Read the original on lennysnewsletter.com →
Alex Cornell, Design Director at Meta, discusses how he designed Muse, Meta's consumer AI agent, to feel intuitive and conversational rather than like a traditional AI app. The episode covers key design decisions including a custom avatar, a three-layer status system, generative UI, and personalized features like a shopping catalog built from Instagram saves. Cornell shares real-world use cases and the mindset shifts designers need to embrace when working with AI-generated outputs.
Key Takeaways
- Muse was intentionally designed to feel like a messaging app rather than an AI tool, lowering the barrier to adoption and making interactions feel natural.
- A three-layer status display was built to accommodate users with varying levels of technical expertise, ensuring transparency without overwhelming non-technical users.
- Generative UI enables highly personalized experiences, such as transforming years of forgotten Instagram saves into a dynamic, daily shopping catalog.
- Designers working on AI products must shift their mindset away from pixel-perfect outputs and embrace variability as a core characteristic of AI-generated interfaces.
- Human emotional responses to AI—such as a user apologizing to Muse—signal important design considerations around personality, tone, and the perceived agency of AI agents.
Excerpt
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…