Assessing the applicability of existing design recommendations to AI companion design: A multi-method study

Abstract

With the rapid proliferation of large language model (LLM)-based systems, AI companions have emerged as conversational agents designed to cultivate emotional connection rather than primarily to support humans in instrumental tasks. Because engagement with AI companions involves relational, emotional, and potentially long-term interactions, their design is consequential. Prior work has offered guidance for designing trustworthy and relational AI systems and has begun to examine design for AI companionship. However, while such work provides insights into possible design solutions, less is known about what makes AI companion design difficult as a design problem. To examine this challenge, we assessed the applicability of existing design recommendations from adjacent domains in the context of AI companion design. Our multi-method investigation unfolded across four phases: literature review, practitioner co-analysis, internal heuristic evaluation, and external expert assessment. Throughout this process, we synthesized nine design principle areas that surfaced tensions in the applicability of existing recommendations to AI companion design. Our findings show that ethical and UX-oriented considerations are deeply intertwined and often require context-sensitive application. We document a systematic, multi-method problem analysis that uses these principle areas as an analytic artifact to examine why existing recommendations cannot be directly transferred to AI companion contexts.