Conversation Patterns
Conversation between humans and AI follows predictable structural patterns. Designing these deliberately — rather than leaving them to model defaults — is core interaction design work.
Turn-Taking Structure
Every human-AI conversation has a rhythm. The designer decides:
- Turn length: Short exchanges (chatbot-style) vs. long-form (essay generation). Match turn length to task complexity.
- Turn initiation: Who speaks first? Does the AI greet, or wait? Does it ask a clarifying question before acting?
- Turn boundaries: How does the user signal "I'm done"? How does the AI signal "I need more"?
Repair Sequences
Conversations break down. Repair is how they recover:
- Self-repair: The AI detects its own error and corrects ("Actually, let me revise that...")
- Other-repair: The user corrects the AI ("No, I meant the other one")
- Clarification requests: The AI asks for disambiguation before proceeding
- Graceful misunderstanding: The AI acknowledges confusion without frustrating the user
Design repair sequences explicitly. Don't rely on the model to improvise them.
Grounding
Grounding is how participants establish shared understanding:
- Confirmation: "Just to confirm, you want me to..."
- Summarisation: "So far we've covered X, Y, and Z"
- Reference resolution: Handling pronouns, anaphora, and ambiguous references
- Context anchoring: Reminding the user what the AI knows and doesn't know
Dialogue Structure Patterns
Common structural patterns for human-AI conversation:
- Interview: AI asks questions, user answers, AI synthesises
- Co-creation: Turn-by-turn collaborative building
- Instruction-execution: User gives command, AI performs, user evaluates
- Exploration: Open-ended back-and-forth to discover possibilities
- Guided workflow: AI leads the user through a multi-step process
Choose the pattern that matches the task. Don't default to instruction-execution for everything.
Design Artefacts
- Conversation flow diagrams showing turn sequences
- Repair protocol specifications
- Grounding checkpoints mapped to conversation stages
- Turn-taking rules per interaction context