One Chat, and It Grows

Leonardo De La Rocha changed his mind twice in a week about how many AI chats his product should offer, and chose one because customers wanted one place to type.

Leonardo De La Rocha leads design for software used by clinicians, which has a support bot run by an outside vendor and an AI assistant built by the product teams. Clinicians type questions about features into the support bot, because it is the chat they can see, and it cannot answer them. In his newsletter Design Outcomes, he describes how the team settled on one chat.

• On Monday he favoured one entry point that routes each question to the right place. By Wednesday he favoured two entry points side by side, and by Thursday he was back to one chat.
• An engineering partner warned that if the product did not own the customer's first contact, the support vendor's plans would start to steer the product's.
• The final design gives every account one chat that starts with what the support bot does and gains skills as the account grows. The help menu moves into the page header and is no longer a chat.
• De La Rocha concludes that his earlier positions kept two chats because two teams owned them. In his words, "The customer only ever wanted one place to type."

When two teams each own a chat in one product, a design team can start from the single place where the customer expects to type. The use of this beyond De La Rocha's product is an inference.

21 September 2026: when AI agents build quickly, people keep the review, the responsibility and the promises an interface makes.