I'm Adrian Chan, a hands-on, AI-first product and experience designer. I've spent my career taking companies through changes in how they reach their customers: the web, then social, then mobile. Generative AI is the next change of that kind. I've spent the past three years learning it by building with it.
A web agency, 1993–2012
I started Gravity7 as a web agency. Over nearly twenty years it built more than 50 websites and social experiences for retail, technology, publishing and startup companies. Clients included Smith & Hawken, Reel.com, Sierra Designs, Yoga Journal, Webvan and NEC. The work covered online strategy, identity systems and branding, site design and development, information architecture, content management systems, SEO and copywriting. Other clients included Marin Bikes, Game Ready, Intraspect and iSyndicate. The Yoga Journal site won a Maggie award in 2002 and was a finalist again in 2003. Before that, in the mid-1990s, I ran community features and redesigns as a partner at SF-Bay Matchmaker, the Bay Area's leading online dating site, and did online strategy and creative direction for PBS and CBS/Sony as a partner at Illumina Online.
Social interaction design, from 2006
From 2006 I focused on social interaction design (SxD). I looked at social networks and platforms as social architecture: designs that shape how people behave, where follows, shares and likes carry far more than interface elements do. I brought social theory into user experience design: how people see themselves projected online, keep up an online self and a reputation, and use social media for personal purposes. That psychology is why these sites engage people, so it is essential to designing them. I helped define the field in those years, and I worked on product strategy and design for social products. For Klout I defined its 16 influence types. For Likelist I worked on social commerce on the Facebook social graph: retailers offered coupons to the friend people trusted for recommendations in that domain. For France Telecom/Orange I took a post-it note reading “Yelp-killer” to a working demo of a recommendation system, which won its R&D innovation award out of 156 internal projects. For TrustedOpinion I wrote the social and product requirements for a movie recommendation site built on its users' film expertise. Other clients included aSmallWorld, PeerPong and Click.tv. I wrote Principles of Social Interaction Design (2012) and founded the SxD Salon, a shared blog on social interaction design.
AI brings these questions back in a new form. It is becoming part of how content is made and distributed. It is replacing the flat web page. And as personal agents, it is becoming personally useful, even intimate. I’m extending ideas that were central to the social web to AI-first experiences. Social and psychological understanding is essential to a product’s strategy, to the design of its interactions, and to anticipating its opportunities, risks and failures. Design has yet to shape its response to AI, and that is the space I work in.
Deloitte Digital, 2012–2017
At Deloitte Digital I was a customer experience specialist. I helped recruit and build a client-facing team of UX and CX designers. The team carried client needs from the onsite consulting teams to the studio design teams. I also contributed to the go-to-market for digital transformation in the mobile-first years, when every company wanted its own iPhone app, iPad app and site redesign. I led client web, mobile and ecommerce work: requirements, stakeholder and customer research, budgets and design oversight. Clients included Agilent, Atlassian, Chevron, Cisco, Humana, Intel, Janssen, TOMS and Wells Fargo Advisors.
Now: AI-first products and design theory for AI
Since 2023, Gravity7 has been where I design and build AI-first products of my own. I built two of them with AI to prove out product ideas of my own. Both launched in 2026.
- Inquiring Lines is a public library of about 3,000 AI research papers that you explore by question, not by category. Each paper becomes verbatim excerpts, synthesis notes and inquiring lines: questions that connect findings across topics. inquiringlines.com ↗
- Sightlines is a guide to more than 3,500 films, built on taste, mood and lineage instead of "films like this." It has taste readings from your own favorites, mood sliders, how-to-watch guides and 218 film courses. sightlines.media ↗
I also write design theory for AI, with a focus on UX and social interaction design for AI. The essays cover personas, interestingness, knowledge and expertise, and how AI behaves when it is judged. They start with The Evaluative Other, Conversation Is the Medium and Knowledge Custodians. The Design and AI section collects the rest. Then and now traces the design ideas I keep building, from Likelist and Klout to Sightlines.
What I bring
- Digital transformation, from the customer side. Two decades of taking companies through a change in how they reach customers: web, social, mobile, and now AI. At Deloitte Digital I helped shape customer experience work and the go-to-market for digital transformation.
- AI product and experience design. What an AI product should do for the people using it, and how it should present what it knows. This covers conversation, navigation, trust, and what the system shows of its reasoning.
- Hands-on building with AI. I designed and built Inquiring Lines and Sightlines with AI, from the idea to the running site: content pipelines, search, recommendations and editorial checks. I know firsthand what current AI does well in a user experience and where it needs design.
- Design theory for AI, with a focus on UX and social interaction design for AI. It matters more as personal agents become products. My essays cover personas, interestingness, knowledge custodians and how AI behaves when it is judged.
- Research synthesis. What the research says about the question in front of a team, with the papers behind it. This is the method behind the roughly 3,000 papers in Inquiring Lines.
Get in touch
I'm open to conversations, advisory work and hands-on design for AI products and AI customer experience. The best way to reach me is on LinkedIn. See Work with me for what I can help with, and the bio for speaking topics.
I graduated from Stanford University with honors in International Relations in 1988. Outside of work I like film, music, philosophy, linguistics, continental sociology, guitar, cycling and photography.