Design System / Project "Redux"
11/ The “building blocks” of scalability and adaptability in a fast-evolving industry.
Company / Client
Distinct AI
Year
2026 - Present
Type of Work
Full Stack
User Interface
Design System System Architecture
Experience Design
I've never experienced this pace of tech development; not once in over 20 years in my tech career. A hot new AI model, tool, or platform one month may be out of favour the next.
One of my goals is to help Distinct AI preserve optionality. Having lived through startups, fads, and market cycles, the one consistent truth is the ability to pivot quickly and easily. This is a core thesis of Redux’s design system: its “building blocks” provide flexibility and choice.
See "Plug & Play" - a framework for building revenue-generating features, apps, widgets.
Pain Point: UI of the previous eras were restrictive: no floating UI containers, no customization for left-handed users, no hiding of unneeded features, etc.
Users adapted to a workspace, not the other way around.
Solution: A flexible workspace where features can be undocked from their containers and float independently within the main application window.
Workflow-aware and customizable UI are key.
Expanded theming capability means application fonts can be customized. We understand that one user's preference may not appeal to another.
The expanded component library reflects a growing set of powerful features. Examples include custom tags, prompt history search, precision range thresholds, and rotation angle controls.
The Model Hub’s “card” concept is extended to core applications, supporting use cases such as hardware performance monitoring and multitasking across primary, secondary, and tertiary tasks.
More options means more design and development considerations. Details such as corner radius, drop shadow depth, collapsed versus expanded containers, and spacing were carefully studied.
As a believer of "less is more", a design goal is to balance between showing too much vs. too little info at any given step of a workflow.
What is too much for one user may be too little for another.
An undockable tray container removes the limitations of horizontal scrolling. A resizable, floating tray enables improved filtering, sorting, searching, and multitasking.
Unlike prompt-based workflows common in chatbots, Distinct AI users focus on precision tuning with additional controls. Prompting is an initial step. This understanding allows us to de-emphasize the prompt UI's presence as a user's workflow progress.