I’ll tell you one thing, this ridiculous idea that AI will end user interfaces is absurd. Every single AI tool that I’ve opened this week as part of this project is filled with horrible user interfaces. Look at this dialog box in Perplexity (a tool that I generally like):
What the hell is this? No explanation. No context. No warning. It just popped open when I tried to I’m simply trying to connect two tools (Lovable and Perplexity) together.
These interfaces are classic by-programmers-for-programmers UIs, and I’ve been seeing these things since the dawn of visual user interfaces. If AI tools vendors expect to generate widespread adoption, they’re going to need to do better than this.
Undeterred though, I pressed forward. What would happen when I filled out this dialog box? Turns out this is what happens:
Again, no warning, no context, no explanation. Just, enter your credit card, please. What am I buying? How much does it cost? What flavor is it? Stick shift or automatic?
So… no thanks.
Can AI Do Better?
The most generous understanding of what Eric Schmidt is saying is that if these UIs had been generated by an AI instead of a human, they would be better. Maybe that’s true, but it would still require someone to prompt the AI to create these things, and still require the prompter to exercise some judgement over the output. Maybe the human steps away from the process in the future, but it’s doubtful.
The least generous way to understand the point that he’s making is that somehow, AI will remove the need for visual interfaces—that everything we need to do can be done in spoken or written English.
I mean… Just take a look around the world for 10 seconds. Look at all of the different ways information is communicated to you. Books, magazines, newspapers, radio, television, movies, billboards, etc. You know why this is? Because spoken and written English is not enough. It never has been. That’s why we have—over thousands of years of human history—created all these other formats.
So designers, your workflow is certainly going to change, but your work is going do be needed into the future.
Designers, has AI changed your job? Let me know what you’re seeing in your job over at the subscriber chat.
The idea is that eventually AI will be your personal interface to everything. You'll work with your AI to have it show you what you care about in ways that resonate with you.
You won't be going to someone else's app or website to navigate their curated experience for many tasks like reading, shopping, or even social media. Instead you'll have your AI show you what you want to see in formats that you like, and you'll tell it in real time what you want it to change on the fly so your experience is optimized for you.
We're not there yet and it's all very clunky at the moment, but that's the obvious next step and it's going to happen faster than we think.
Hey Josh, interesting thoughts. I tend to agree that the posture of replacing any interface with spoken word or chat is vastly overblown, as this is still an interface for interacting with the computer (HCI, anyone?), and actually tends to be more tedious for the average user to walk through than a simple interface would be for many things...And, of course, still needs designing to some degree.
For clarification however, what's the list of AI tools you were trying out? I too was a bit of a later adopter, but am now a full convert after seeing the many more fit-for-purpose tooling coming out as of late.