What will design look like once today’s AI tech has matured?
Will everything be a command line interface (CLI)? Maybe. I know that I’ve seen a proliferation of CLIs in the knowledge management space—and that’s before the explosion in features that AI is bringing about.
However, CLIs are terrible for learnability and memorability. In products that I use with CLIs, there must be dozens of basic functions that would be useful but I don’t even they know exist—and there are still others that I’ve used before, but never remember to utilize when it counts.
No, I don’t think we’ll ever completely get rid of buttons, for instance.
That doesn’t mean user interfaces aren’t going to change in fundamental ways. If for no other reason than the fact that AI is going to super-power product building and feature expansion, we just won’t be able to keep up with all of the capabilities from a coherent design perspective. How many functionalities will live and die in the same quarter, as product moves on to the next big experience and drops the poor performers? Human creativity will continue to be a costly resource that organizations are only going to want to invest in successful features.
What about zero UI? Couldn’t some products function with nothing but a device that listens to the user’s requests and commands, then displays the output to the user?
This might end up being true for some products. But even for those, not everyone will be able to operate by voice commands alone. And even for those who can, they won’t want to always do so. Some environments aren’t suitable for such interactions. A person can get tired of talking. Or maybe they want to listen to music while they work instead. Some people will think and work better by typing and clicking.
My intuition tells me that user interfaces are about to undergo an extreme transformation (or two). But at the same time, there will be a lot of commonalities that remain. Still… I’d recommend getting accustomed to finding yourself in unanchored space if you work in user interfaces.