Rethinking the AI Assistant Interface
Most AI assistants today are delivered through a familiar but limiting format: a text box on a screen. It is comfortable and consistent across products, yet it can also feel transactional and cold. At MacPaw, the design team behind the new AI assistant Eney set out to challenge that convention by exploring what happens when an AI tool is designed less like a utility and more like a character.
Humans naturally connect with things that resemble us — animals, faces, and characters with relatable traits. Eney was built on that premise, pairing utility with personality. The goal was not to create another chatbot window, but a proactive assistant that feels approachable and expressive while remaining genuinely useful.
Designing Personality With Restraint
Eney’s form went through several iterations before settling on a circular figure. The circle was chosen for its simplicity and approachability, helping the assistant feel like a calm, floating companion on the desktop rather than another rigid interface element. A minimal face design carries the emotional weight: the eyes serve as the primary connector, communicating emotion without tipping into cartoonish territory.
A key design constraint was restraint. The team deliberately curated a small set of emotions and gestures for Eney to express, ensuring each one conveyed useful information. During task execution, for example, the character’s figure resembles a loading icon. On-screen movement was kept minimal to avoid distraction, striking a balance between being expressive and being professional — cheerful, but not childish or overly playful.
Color played a strategic role as well. Many AI products lean on blue because it is associated with intelligence, but the team wanted Eney to stand out in a crowded field. They chose pink for its warmth and visual stimulation, giving the assistant a distinctive presence on screen without feeling aggressive.
Human Direction Behind AI-Driven Work
The design process for Eney underscores a broader point about the current AI era. While AI tools accelerate certain stages of design work, the intentional decisions — style, emotion, size, name — were all made by human designers. The technology supported the process, but it did not drive it.
As designers, it’s more important than ever to have good judgment, artistic direction, integrity, and emotional sensitivity when working in the field. Technology like AI can help us work faster, but it can’t replace the values that inspire and shape our work.
For creatives concerned about AI replacing human artists, projects like this illustrate a healthier relationship with the technology. AI can handle research and speed up iteration — tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT are useful in the early stages of a project — but the taste, judgment, and manual craft behind a final design remain distinctly human skills.
The takeaway for designers navigating the shift is straightforward: learn the tools, but stay at the wheel. Curiosity builds taste over time, and in an era of generated content, that taste becomes more valuable, not less.
