Your AI agent reused the wrong kind of screen. Name the experience purpose.
Say you ask your AI agent for a staff check-in screen at example.com. It returns a wide editorial layout, a large heading, and a single "Get started" button. You ask for a member briefing instead, and the next result is a dense table with bulk actions.
The agent reused a familiar pattern from a different kind of work.
Design Decision Method's agent procedure asks the agent to identify the experience purpose before it decides how a screen should look and behave. The live docs already use that idea in an illustration: a short request is not operational monitoring. The procedure is more specific. It names six purposes: operational work, reading and storytelling, exploration, evaluation and purchase, creation and editing, and participation and collaboration. Mixed-purpose products can use a different approach per flow.
What follows are four short, fictional illustrations on example.com. They are not case studies, and they do not report measured results.
Operational work
A staff tool for checking people into today's workshop. The job is to find a name, mark attendance, and undo a mistake.
The procedure's purpose reference treats operational work as a heuristic, not a mandatory template. It points to stable placement, visible state, fast entry, and reversible actions. A magazine-style page that hides the current list is the wrong import. So is a decorative metric row that does not help someone complete the check-in.
Reading and storytelling
A monthly member briefing: a short article with a clear reading order, headings, and a path into a longer report.
Here the priorities shift. The reference talks about reading order, pacing, and routes into deeper content. The procedure also says that reading or exploration need not end in a transaction or a single primary button. A checkout-shaped page, or a dashboard of tiles, imports another domain's conventions. The briefing can simply be readable on a phone.
Evaluation and purchase
A flow to buy a workshop ticket, with a date, a concession option, the total cost, and the cancellation terms.
For evaluation and purchase, the reference asks for suitability, variations, availability, total cost, terms, and an informed commitment — plus a way to correct the order. A dense admin table that buries the price is not that job. Neither is a long story page that never states what the buyer is committing to. Acceptance in this flow is about an informed choice, not about finishing a staff task.
AI as a capability, not a new purpose
example.com also has a small helper that drafts a workshop description. Because that AI feature already exists, the procedure says to apply AI checks only there: say what the helper can do and where it is limited, separate generating a draft from publishing it, and do not show fabricated confidence figures.
If the product had no AI feature, the rule is simpler: do not add AI controls. The purpose reference is just as plain: treat AI as a capability within a purpose, not a reason to replace every interface with chat. The ticket flow should stay a ticket flow.
Why this matters
Agents are good at completing a pattern they have seen. They are less good at noticing that the pattern belongs to another job. The procedure warns against importing one domain's conventions into another — an operations dashboard for a site that needed a readable page, for example.
Establish context is where purpose belongs, alongside audience, frequency, mistake cost, and device. Later, deliver and validate asks for acceptance criteria matched to that purpose: task execution in the check-in tool, comprehension in the briefing, informed purchase in the ticket flow.
The method does not claim this saves time. That has not been measured. It also does not guarantee a good result. What it gives you is a place to catch a borrowed layout before it hardens.
Try it
Design Decision Method is a lightweight design decision workflow for developers building interfaces with AI agents. It follows the open Agent Skills format and is MIT licensed. Install paths for Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Codex are in the README.