Designing Without Precedent: Creating Interaction Models for New Technology

Most product designers have the luxury of reference.

You want to build a calendar app? There are a thousand examples.
Designing a dashboard? Copy and refine.
Even voice interfaces now have loose standards you can riff on.

But what happens when you’re working on something no one’s built before?

What happens when there’s no precedent?

That’s the space we live in at Polyform—designing interaction models for technologies that don’t have a visual language yet. AI. AR. Voice. Gesture. Sensor-based environments. Ambient computing.

You don’t get a style guide for these.

You get fog.

The Product That Broke the Pattern

We were brought in to design an AI-powered voice system.
No screen. No keyboard. Just natural language and a voice.

At first, we did what most teams do:
We tried to map what we knew onto the unknown.
We borrowed from IVR systems, chatbots, smart speakers, and screen readers.
But nothing fit.

Because this wasn’t a chatbot.
And it wasn’t a hands-free UI.
It was something entirely new.

So We Changed Our Approach

Instead of trying to design a “better voice app,”
we asked: what are the constraints of this interaction?

• No screen means no visual hierarchy.

• No keyboard means no input fields.

• No touch means no tap, drag, hover, swipe.

We had to rewire our instincts.

Things we usually take for granted—like undo, feedback, confirmation, wayfinding—suddenly needed brand new patterns.

What does “back” mean in a conversation?
How do you recover from a mistake when you can't see it?
How do you know what’s possible without seeing a menu?

These aren’t UI questions.
They’re interaction philosophy questions.

The Three Tools We Leaned On

When you’re designing without precedent, you need a different toolkit.
Here’s what we used:

1. First Principles Thinking
   Strip away interface and ask: What’s the job to be done?
   When you stop designing a “feature” and start designing the action, you get to the core.

2. Behavioral Simulation
   We mocked real-world scenarios with actual people. Played them out loud.
   Recorded timing. Interruption. Confusion. Flow.
   If the conversation broke down, so did the design.

3. Progressive Disclosure
   With no screen, everything needed to feel effortless—but not overwhelming.
   We designed the interaction to reveal complexity only when needed, never upfront.

The result wasn’t a traditional interface.
It was an interaction framework—a system for guiding users through action without ever showing them anything.

Designing for the Unknown Is the Job

There’s no template for designing in AR.
There’s no handbook for gesture-based interfaces.
There’s no playbook for probabilistic AI behavior.

So you build it.

You take the raw materials—human behavior, user psychology, technical constraints—and you invent the blueprint.

You don’t design for delight.
You design for orientation.
For trust. For meaning. For flow.

And if you do it right, people will say:
“This just makes sense.”

Even if they’ve never used anything like it before.

Final Thought

Designing without precedent isn’t a niche skill.
It’s becoming the standard.

The interfaces of the future won’t come with pattern libraries.
They’ll come with ambiguity, risk, and opportunity.

And the designers who thrive will be the ones who don’t just polish pixels—
they build the logic that makes something new feel natural.

That’s what we do at Polyform.

If you’re building what comes next, and you want people to get it— let’s make something that’s never existed, and make it obvious. Contact Us.