7 ms·

Generative UI and outcome-oriented design

71 points by thm 3y ago

gedy 3y ago
> The Outcome-Oriented Designer - Because AI systems can shortcut the information-seeking process, the human design of microinteractions will become substantially less important. They’ll either be inexistent (because the AI system makes them unnecessary), or they’ll be dynamically designed through generative UI to fit the user’s exact context and needs. Interesting ideas, though from companies I've worked with, there is a huge cadre of UX people that know nothing else and would likely fight this tooth and nail.
- threatofrain 3y ago
  It also means that designers will own more responsibility and become closer to a researcher who is paired with a AI partner. It's an upgrade in prestige.
  - gibbitz 3y ago
    Provided the company feels like paying for both which they don't. Even if this technology sucks and consumers don't like it, it will be used widely and UX people will be laid off. Any time commercial use art could be automated at the expense of creative labor it has been -- from illuminated manuscripts by the printing press to illustration by photography to typesetting by desktop publishing and now from art direction to AI. Oddly enough, the most cut & paste jobs are management and no one is illustrating how effective AI could be replacing those jobs. It shows off the ingenuity of the creators better when "AI" looks creative. Someone needs to show how it's better at analyzing risks based on measurable outcomes than most C-level executives already. The top 20% of my company makes more than 60% of the wages. The savings are way better and the technology is considerably easier.
- greatpostman 3y ago
  It basically means throwing out everything we know about ux design
danielvaughn 3y ago
The more I learn about AI, the less confident I feel that we'll solve the bias and hallucination problems. A lot of these "in the future we will..." predictions assume a linear path towards progress, while the actual path is looking more and more asymptotic.
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  Yeah, I've been monkeying around with an AI tool to help me query piles and piles of PDF files - bazillions of specification documents and suchlike - and if there's a single thing I've taken away from it, it's that I can't expect the same answer twice, even for questions that have just the one correct answer. That's all after preprocessing those PDFs, because there were some characters and sequences that blew up the works. That took some hunting. I did learn that FOSI processors love injecting x00 null characters into the PDF for some godforsaken reason. Didn't know that. Don't know why, though, and probably never will. Falling back on older school techniques - from stats, text mining, topic models and other arcana - for some tasks is probably going to be worth it, for a while anyway. Most users can't use any of this stuff, it's too CLI-ish for the vast majority of the people doing actual work. I suspect this is the gap the OP is hoping to insert themselves into, that gap between these . . these so-called "AI" things . . and the average user, but they're going to need to do a better job of scoping out just how big a job that is. Now take all this with the following boulder o salt: we can't use any of the big cloud things, everything we do here has to be brewed up on prem, by people like me who do not know what we're doing. So we're not exactly AI superstars. Odds are everything I say is irrelevant for the outside world, with all your Geminis and whatnot.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    What's the tool? With temperature set to 0, the output should be reproducible, given the same input conditions.
    - skeledrew 3y ago
      Actually not even a temperature of 0 guarantees exact reproduction. It just doesn't work that way (unsure if they have the specific reason, or if it's part of the design).
hansonkd 3y ago
A good GenerativeUI product depends on a datasource for the AI to have some working history to make decisions about what kind of interface to show a user. An A/B test needs thousands of samples in some cases to make a determination about which is preferred. A generative UI would be like running 100 simultaneous a/b tests for your users. I would think you would need a significant amount of traffic on the order of millions of users to be able to determine to some degree that one UI configuration is better for a particular type of user. Without the data to know what works the AI will essentially just be randomly generating UIs for each user. Defining an outcome is actually one of the hardest problems in AI and even in organizations. While you think startups can easily just say "make the UI that gets the most revenue" that isn't necessarily true. For example if a terrible user experience results in more short term revenue but your users die out, that isn't a good outcome for the company. Or maybe you have a free tier that you want people to use for network effect, etc. So it is very hard to have a single number to use for outcome. If every user has a different UI, then it also becomes hard to spot things that go against the company's interests, etc.
batshit_beaver 3y ago
For an article about generative AI/UI, there sure is a lot of talk about recommendations and predictions. As another side note, the idea of a UI that changes every time you open the site/app is, frankly, ridiculous. Not sure what kind of UX researcher or even user would want that. Seems like a saner approach would be one of two worlds below: 1) Each app has a carefully designed foundation on top of which user-customizable components exist. This is already common, sans GenAI-powered component creation. 2) There is no longer a concept of an "app." Users instead interact primarily with a smorgasbord of APIs, via their highly personalized but temporally consistent, AI-assisted personal OS.
- Jonovono 3y ago
  "As another side note, the idea of a UI that changes every time you open the site/app is, frankly, ridiculous." That's what we have now, already. GenUI would be the opposite, where if you wanted, the UI could never change and it would stay the same if thats what you want. Totally agree the concept of apps will break down.
  - jacobsimon 3y ago
    That's a great point. Imagine you had an AI-based browser that could adapt any website into a consistent UI or reading experience.
    - jayd16 3y ago
      Technically possible now, I suppose. If you're Google and have the analytics, you could make a standard site layout and munge every site into that format based on usage data. Neat idea.
    - hansonkd 3y ago
      Websites have spent the last 20 years removing user customizable functionality (think RSS feeds and making API private). While the tech may be possible, I don't see this being a reality without a major reversal in app development philosophies. Companies want to control what you see so they can control their revenue. Why would they want to expose their data and utility to UIs where they have limited ability to monetize?
willsmith72 3y ago
Nice idea, and I love outcome-oriented design. There's so much time wasted, especially in startups, on minute UI details which almost certainly have 0 measurable impact. But I don't really agree you need generative ui > This individual example may be plausible without genUI, but not at scale. Nothing about that example seems implausible at scale. It's just a combination of personnalisations, saved settings, and learnt user preferences. Maybe no one puts that particular example together to that level today, but there's nothing stopping someone doing it today without generative ui.
andybak 3y ago
> However, in the short-term, we anticipate quite a few problems and challenges. For some values of "short-term" and "quite a few"
jayd16 3y ago
Good luck helping your grandma over the phone now. Stack overflow or even a video tutorial? Useless. Seems like predictable should beat customized for something like a gui.
mihaic 3y ago
The big issue I see with this type of personalization of UI is how much worse I would become at helping others to get things done, since my muscle memory for an interface would have been made for my UI. This lack of shared similarity in the workspace is also another big issue with Apple Vision for instance, but nobody really uses it more than a few hours to get to this realization.
- mateo1 3y ago
  This is not about improving your experience. This is about getting end users to behave a certain way. If you have a gambling or trading app, you could automatically adjust the UI based on your end users psychological/behavioral profile, gradually over time, to put the more profitable/higher risk option in more prominent/more likely to be used positions. Or maybe your user clicks "block access" by muscle memory and your AI based predictor finds out that if they replace the block button with the allow button users now click allow way more. Big success. I can't wait to see how much more value we can extract from people by controlling their behavior through UIs.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  This is one of the reasons I dislike feature flagging. Hard to teach people how to use software if their copy is different from my copy.
troupo 3y ago
This article is a nothingburger attempt to capitalize on the AI hype. None of it makes any sense if you stop to think about it for even a second. Anything from ever-changing UIs to the actual state of AIs to the basic systemic issue that you can't properly describe all the outcomes a person needs from a product without it being self-contradictory (and ever changing to boot). Edit: this will not stop multiple startups from chasing VC money using this idea
GrinningFool 3y ago
The most important rule I've learned for interfaces (UI - but also API and others) is that they should be self-consistent with no surprises. The user learns what to expect and they can rely on it, which generally makes it easier for them to navigate and get the results they want. It seems to me that a generated UI does the opposite of that, and leads to a lot of uncertainty... ... How does support help them, or even troubleshoot problems when the user describes what they saw and did? ... How can one person instruct another in accomplishing a task when the interface is different? ... How can you document the instructions for accomplishing specific goals? ... How user-unfriendly is a UI that not only changes per user, but could change over time as more data is gathered about how the user is interacting? Especially if the user needs to do something out of the ordinary [for them], the means of doing it can get buried over time.
- visarga 3y ago
  > they should be self-consistent with no surprises And LLMs are exactly what is needed - they know the consistent and no-surprise answer to anything. The UI will adapt to serve your needs, that's how it can help you. The web we see today is full of dark UI patterns and junk content. A generative UI could filter, rank and present the pile of garbage in a clean form. Social networks and big website operators control what we see, in what order we see it, and how it is presented. All of them carry vectors of attack. They abuse the public. For example FB was always changing where it put various user settings, and resetting them from time to time. An AI agent that creates a generative UI can guard your preferences. I see these gen-UI agents as running locally in privacy. They interface with the web to interact and gather information, and distill it into bespoke UIs. They overrule all the power games publishers played with users and try to prevent users inadvertently leaking private information, an AI firewall, especially needed now that the web will be filled with synthetic text and other AI agents. Few people will still look at the raw web, we will wear a protective mask of gen-UI.
  - FridgeSeal 3y ago
    LLM’s struggle to return the same answer twice, and now you’re suggesting they’ll magically and consistently mediate UX and API differences? I have a hard time believing that.
_Adam 3y ago
>Outcome-oriented design involves orchestrating experience design with a greater focus on user goals and final outcomes, while strategically automating aspects of interaction and interface design. Dark patterns is another type of "outcome oriented design" where the outcome is the user subscribing/not canceling/paying needlessly. Adding "strategic automation" will doubtlessly just make this problem worse.
g8oz 3y ago
This article is exactly the type of empty handwavy thought leadership being pushed by every outfit seeking to capitalize on AI. I'm sure many lucrative consulting engagements will follow.
- jdpigeon 3y ago
  Yeah. Unclear after reading this whether anything meeting their definition of GenUI actually exists or whether this is just speculation
  - skeledrew 3y ago
    It was clear to me that it was speculation.
  - Bjartr 3y ago
    The first sentence of the article is > In the future, generative UI will dynamically create customized user interfaces in real-time. That's fairly unambiguous in saying that such things don't yet exist.
- victor106 3y ago
  Completely agree. But unfortunately this is a sure shot way to rake in the big bucks. Lot of companies budgets are unfortunately still controlled by people who fall for buzzwords and who don’t have the time or inclination to look a bit deeper and understand core concepts and tradeoffs. So they refuse to look at things a little critically.
- lumost 3y ago
  I believe this is overly skeptical. While the tech plainly isn't there yet it's easy to see where things are going. Unlike the voice assistants of old, the newer ai tools can be blended into radically different use cases with relatively little work. The big problems which are blocking these products from leaving the impressive demo stage is hallucinations, quality, and constraints. To my knowledge these are all solvable, albeit expensive.
  - 3y ago
aatd86 3y ago
Can't even borrow someone laptop anymore... The UI is different... I doubt that UIs are going to be tailored to every and each person.
- dexwiz 3y ago
  Can’t help but feel that is a bit like saying can’t go to another website, the UI is different.
  - aatd86 3y ago
    Not really. Two different websites will not serve the same purpose. But if I need to use word on some other machine, lest it requires to log into some account which I don't think should be required... The UI better be streamlined. The same way google sheet and microsoft word are not too dissimilar. That's for a good reason.
FridgeSeal 3y ago
So the AI will console some information, and make some kind of UI, the some decisions about layout, and functionality and magically adapt? Yeah this is going to be so great for usability. “Where did the “foo” button go?” Oh right, the AI has magically decided I am better off with it somewhere else. “Why did the interface change completely today?” Oh right, the AI is having a moment. This feels like a usability nightmare. This screams upper-management consultancy, doesnt value the work that goes into design and UX and would love to cream some money by pretending they could fire an entire department.
fragmede 3y ago
Microsoft Office already did the ribbon thing. Time to try it again?
upsidepotential 3y ago
Increasingly likely that UI evolution will prioritize a shift from a "click"-centric approach to one that's "command" oriented. This means AI agents interpreting your instructions and executing task processes, rather than continually reconfiguring the UX to match your preferences. High computing costs with AI also favor instruction-to-task completion dynamic, not just indulging in elaborate screen layout adjustments.
AlienRobot 3y ago
Take a look at one of the linked services https://canonic.dev/ https://canonic.dev/ This is what the future looks like, but without dragging and dropping. It's just a bunch of blocks stacked in grids, columns, and rows. This is what GUI and UX has become. Just black text on white rectangles, because it needs to adapt to every form factor, be accessible, be internationizable, be blahblahblabhlabblahblahblah. It has to be generic. GenUI is the next step in a very depressing trend of sucking out all the color from websites and applications, and just the thought of it happening makes me very sad. I'd have a much better "user experience" if I found a website that turned my cursor into a sword.
victorbjorklund 3y ago
No. This is horrible for UX/UI. No thanks to the app being different for me and different everytime I log in.
devinprater 3y ago
Oh great. So I'll have to tell websites and apps, and Google and Facebook (sign in with), that I'm blind, so that I get an accessible experience? Great.
mattkevan 3y ago
I'm a UX designer and I'm also learning as much as I can about AI, working through courses from Jeremy Howard and Andrej Kaparthy, amongst others. This article is absolute nonsense and I'd expect more from N/N, which I usually respect. Not only does it forget everything about good UX, it also shows a lack of understanding of AI, how it works and where it's useful, treating it like some magic fairy dust that can be sprinkled about and magically solve all problems. A system that completely reconfigures itself based on what it predicts that particular might want, based on biased or incomplete data, sounds like a terrible idea. Support alone would be a nightmare – if the interface changes for each customer, do the guides and videos also change? How would customer support know what the user's looking at? However, I do like the idea of being able to tell a system the result you want, then it showing you the best way to achieve it. For example, few people go to an appliance website to look at washing machines for fun. They go because they want clean socks. A system that could help them find the right machine to clean their particular socks quickly might be valuable. Generative UX sounds fancy but falls apart at the slightest bit of actual thought.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  I think it would be productive for you to focus on other sources to learn about AI. You are probably better of looking at what people achieve using LLMs and prompting instead of focusing on the fundamentals of probability theory. > A system that completely reconfigures itself based on what it predicts that particular might want, based on biased or incomplete data, sounds like a terrible idea. This sentence shows a quite off understanding of the AI developments for this type of applications. This would be the same as saying that ChatGPT is entirely useless as each character is responds is merely chosen from a probability distribution of the previous characters. While the assessment is technically correct, it diminishes the fact ath it has huge value. I also see that you have a lot of concerns by trying to predict how this affects other parts of a product (customer support, etc.). While I understand that this type of uncertainty is uncomfortable these things usually fan out alright (or at least profitable). A comment like this sound like an 70s postman who says that electronic "internet" would never work because people would not be able to communicate with the rigour of handwritten letters. I am not saying that this article is right or wrong. I merely say that a bit of curiosity would be beneficial when assessing new ideas - that can also be the difference of being in or out of the job market in 4 years.
noAnswer 3y ago
A constantly changing UI was a bad idea when it first got unleashed with Microsoft Office XP and still is a bad idea today! (It should not be confuses with a customizable UI though.) People who suggest this should be forced to work at a IT Helpdesk for the next 1000 years.
ingigauti 3y ago
Couple of weeks ago I published a new programming language, Plang (as in pseudo language), which will allow the user to customize his own UI The window app is mostly a proof of concept for now, as it runs only on Windows, you can see how it works in this video https://youtu.be/RJYv5PUz9bY?si=ZzrXL4HJq7ANL6H6 https://youtu.be/RJYv5PUz9bY?si=ZzrXL4HJq7ANL6H6 The language out self is in natural language, if that interested you, check out https://github.com/plangHQ https://github.com/plangHQ
madsbuch 3y ago
While I don't know how this will manifest in real products there are some insights to why this development is important. These insights come from the huge successes of the LLMs where we are at. The insights is the ability to emit knowledge in different dialects. An example is understand legalese. I am not able to do that as I have no degree in law. But LLMs are hugely effective at taking me through a legal filing and understand what I need to put into each field. The hope is that developments like this will ensure the most efficient interface for a given group of people: Arabic speakers get an interface that take right to left writing into account. Legal people get a language they undrstand and laymen get an interface that caters to them. I see a lot of critical comments around this. In my opinion, this will turn out to be an accessibility thing (Probably mandated by the EU in some years). Just like it is considered good form to support text to speech software for vision impaired people is it today.

71 points by thm 3y ago

gedy 3y ago

> The Outcome-Oriented Designer - Because AI systems can shortcut the information-seeking process, the human design of microinteractions will become substantially less important. They’ll either be inexistent (because the AI system makes them unnecessary), or they’ll be dynamically designed through generative UI to fit the user’s exact context and needs. Interesting ideas, though from companies I've worked with, there is a huge cadre of UX people that know nothing else and would likely fight this tooth and nail.

threatofrain 3y ago
It also means that designers will own more responsibility and become closer to a researcher who is paired with a AI partner. It's an upgrade in prestige.
- gibbitz 3y ago
  Provided the company feels like paying for both which they don't. Even if this technology sucks and consumers don't like it, it will be used widely and UX people will be laid off. Any time commercial use art could be automated at the expense of creative labor it has been -- from illuminated manuscripts by the printing press to illustration by photography to typesetting by desktop publishing and now from art direction to AI. Oddly enough, the most cut & paste jobs are management and no one is illustrating how effective AI could be replacing those jobs. It shows off the ingenuity of the creators better when "AI" looks creative. Someone needs to show how it's better at analyzing risks based on measurable outcomes than most C-level executives already. The top 20% of my company makes more than 60% of the wages. The savings are way better and the technology is considerably easier.
greatpostman 3y ago
It basically means throwing out everything we know about ux design

danielvaughn 3y ago

The more I learn about AI, the less confident I feel that we'll solve the bias and hallucination problems. A lot of these "in the future we will..." predictions assume a linear path towards progress, while the actual path is looking more and more asymptotic.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago
Yeah, I've been monkeying around with an AI tool to help me query piles and piles of PDF files - bazillions of specification documents and suchlike - and if there's a single thing I've taken away from it, it's that I can't expect the same answer twice, even for questions that have just the one correct answer. That's all after preprocessing those PDFs, because there were some characters and sequences that blew up the works. That took some hunting. I did learn that FOSI processors love injecting x00 null characters into the PDF for some godforsaken reason. Didn't know that. Don't know why, though, and probably never will. Falling back on older school techniques - from stats, text mining, topic models and other arcana - for some tasks is probably going to be worth it, for a while anyway. Most users can't use any of this stuff, it's too CLI-ish for the vast majority of the people doing actual work. I suspect this is the gap the OP is hoping to insert themselves into, that gap between these . . these so-called "AI" things . . and the average user, but they're going to need to do a better job of scoping out just how big a job that is. Now take all this with the following boulder o salt: we can't use any of the big cloud things, everything we do here has to be brewed up on prem, by people like me who do not know what we're doing. So we're not exactly AI superstars. Odds are everything I say is irrelevant for the outside world, with all your Geminis and whatnot.
- fragmede 3y ago
  What's the tool? With temperature set to 0, the output should be reproducible, given the same input conditions.
  - skeledrew 3y ago
    Actually not even a temperature of 0 guarantees exact reproduction. It just doesn't work that way (unsure if they have the specific reason, or if it's part of the design).

hansonkd 3y ago

A good GenerativeUI product depends on a datasource for the AI to have some working history to make decisions about what kind of interface to show a user. An A/B test needs thousands of samples in some cases to make a determination about which is preferred. A generative UI would be like running 100 simultaneous a/b tests for your users. I would think you would need a significant amount of traffic on the order of millions of users to be able to determine to some degree that one UI configuration is better for a particular type of user. Without the data to know what works the AI will essentially just be randomly generating UIs for each user. Defining an outcome is actually one of the hardest problems in AI and even in organizations. While you think startups can easily just say "make the UI that gets the most revenue" that isn't necessarily true. For example if a terrible user experience results in more short term revenue but your users die out, that isn't a good outcome for the company. Or maybe you have a free tier that you want people to use for network effect, etc. So it is very hard to have a single number to use for outcome. If every user has a different UI, then it also becomes hard to spot things that go against the company's interests, etc.

batshit_beaver 3y ago

For an article about generative AI/UI, there sure is a lot of talk about recommendations and predictions. As another side note, the idea of a UI that changes every time you open the site/app is, frankly, ridiculous. Not sure what kind of UX researcher or even user would want that. Seems like a saner approach would be one of two worlds below: 1) Each app has a carefully designed foundation on top of which user-customizable components exist. This is already common, sans GenAI-powered component creation. 2) There is no longer a concept of an "app." Users instead interact primarily with a smorgasbord of APIs, via their highly personalized but temporally consistent, AI-assisted personal OS.

Jonovono 3y ago
"As another side note, the idea of a UI that changes every time you open the site/app is, frankly, ridiculous." That's what we have now, already. GenUI would be the opposite, where if you wanted, the UI could never change and it would stay the same if thats what you want. Totally agree the concept of apps will break down.
- jacobsimon 3y ago
  That's a great point. Imagine you had an AI-based browser that could adapt any website into a consistent UI or reading experience.
  - jayd16 3y ago
    Technically possible now, I suppose. If you're Google and have the analytics, you could make a standard site layout and munge every site into that format based on usage data. Neat idea.
  - hansonkd 3y ago
    Websites have spent the last 20 years removing user customizable functionality (think RSS feeds and making API private). While the tech may be possible, I don't see this being a reality without a major reversal in app development philosophies. Companies want to control what you see so they can control their revenue. Why would they want to expose their data and utility to UIs where they have limited ability to monetize?

willsmith72 3y ago

Nice idea, and I love outcome-oriented design. There's so much time wasted, especially in startups, on minute UI details which almost certainly have 0 measurable impact. But I don't really agree you need generative ui > This individual example may be plausible without genUI, but not at scale. Nothing about that example seems implausible at scale. It's just a combination of personnalisations, saved settings, and learnt user preferences. Maybe no one puts that particular example together to that level today, but there's nothing stopping someone doing it today without generative ui.

andybak 3y ago

> However, in the short-term, we anticipate quite a few problems and challenges. For some values of "short-term" and "quite a few"

jayd16 3y ago

Good luck helping your grandma over the phone now. Stack overflow or even a video tutorial? Useless. Seems like predictable should beat customized for something like a gui.

mihaic 3y ago

The big issue I see with this type of personalization of UI is how much worse I would become at helping others to get things done, since my muscle memory for an interface would have been made for my UI. This lack of shared similarity in the workspace is also another big issue with Apple Vision for instance, but nobody really uses it more than a few hours to get to this realization.

mateo1 3y ago
This is not about improving your experience. This is about getting end users to behave a certain way. If you have a gambling or trading app, you could automatically adjust the UI based on your end users psychological/behavioral profile, gradually over time, to put the more profitable/higher risk option in more prominent/more likely to be used positions. Or maybe your user clicks "block access" by muscle memory and your AI based predictor finds out that if they replace the block button with the allow button users now click allow way more. Big success. I can't wait to see how much more value we can extract from people by controlling their behavior through UIs.
datadrivenangel 3y ago
This is one of the reasons I dislike feature flagging. Hard to teach people how to use software if their copy is different from my copy.

troupo 3y ago

This article is a nothingburger attempt to capitalize on the AI hype. None of it makes any sense if you stop to think about it for even a second. Anything from ever-changing UIs to the actual state of AIs to the basic systemic issue that you can't properly describe all the outcomes a person needs from a product without it being self-contradictory (and ever changing to boot). Edit: this will not stop multiple startups from chasing VC money using this idea

GrinningFool 3y ago

The most important rule I've learned for interfaces (UI - but also API and others) is that they should be self-consistent with no surprises. The user learns what to expect and they can rely on it, which generally makes it easier for them to navigate and get the results they want. It seems to me that a generated UI does the opposite of that, and leads to a lot of uncertainty... ... How does support help them, or even troubleshoot problems when the user describes what they saw and did? ... How can one person instruct another in accomplishing a task when the interface is different? ... How can you document the instructions for accomplishing specific goals? ... How user-unfriendly is a UI that not only changes per user, but could change over time as more data is gathered about how the user is interacting? Especially if the user needs to do something out of the ordinary [for them], the means of doing it can get buried over time.

visarga 3y ago
> they should be self-consistent with no surprises And LLMs are exactly what is needed - they know the consistent and no-surprise answer to anything. The UI will adapt to serve your needs, that's how it can help you. The web we see today is full of dark UI patterns and junk content. A generative UI could filter, rank and present the pile of garbage in a clean form. Social networks and big website operators control what we see, in what order we see it, and how it is presented. All of them carry vectors of attack. They abuse the public. For example FB was always changing where it put various user settings, and resetting them from time to time. An AI agent that creates a generative UI can guard your preferences. I see these gen-UI agents as running locally in privacy. They interface with the web to interact and gather information, and distill it into bespoke UIs. They overrule all the power games publishers played with users and try to prevent users inadvertently leaking private information, an AI firewall, especially needed now that the web will be filled with synthetic text and other AI agents. Few people will still look at the raw web, we will wear a protective mask of gen-UI.
- FridgeSeal 3y ago
  LLM’s struggle to return the same answer twice, and now you’re suggesting they’ll magically and consistently mediate UX and API differences? I have a hard time believing that.

_Adam 3y ago

>Outcome-oriented design involves orchestrating experience design with a greater focus on user goals and final outcomes, while strategically automating aspects of interaction and interface design. Dark patterns is another type of "outcome oriented design" where the outcome is the user subscribing/not canceling/paying needlessly. Adding "strategic automation" will doubtlessly just make this problem worse.

g8oz 3y ago

This article is exactly the type of empty handwavy thought leadership being pushed by every outfit seeking to capitalize on AI. I'm sure many lucrative consulting engagements will follow.

jdpigeon 3y ago
Yeah. Unclear after reading this whether anything meeting their definition of GenUI actually exists or whether this is just speculation
- skeledrew 3y ago
  It was clear to me that it was speculation.
- Bjartr 3y ago
  The first sentence of the article is > In the future, generative UI will dynamically create customized user interfaces in real-time. That's fairly unambiguous in saying that such things don't yet exist.
victor106 3y ago
Completely agree. But unfortunately this is a sure shot way to rake in the big bucks. Lot of companies budgets are unfortunately still controlled by people who fall for buzzwords and who don’t have the time or inclination to look a bit deeper and understand core concepts and tradeoffs. So they refuse to look at things a little critically.
lumost 3y ago
I believe this is overly skeptical. While the tech plainly isn't there yet it's easy to see where things are going. Unlike the voice assistants of old, the newer ai tools can be blended into radically different use cases with relatively little work. The big problems which are blocking these products from leaving the impressive demo stage is hallucinations, quality, and constraints. To my knowledge these are all solvable, albeit expensive.
- 3y ago

aatd86 3y ago

Can't even borrow someone laptop anymore... The UI is different... I doubt that UIs are going to be tailored to every and each person.

dexwiz 3y ago
Can’t help but feel that is a bit like saying can’t go to another website, the UI is different.
- aatd86 3y ago
  Not really. Two different websites will not serve the same purpose. But if I need to use word on some other machine, lest it requires to log into some account which I don't think should be required... The UI better be streamlined. The same way google sheet and microsoft word are not too dissimilar. That's for a good reason.

FridgeSeal 3y ago

So the AI will console some information, and make some kind of UI, the some decisions about layout, and functionality and magically adapt? Yeah this is going to be so great for usability. “Where did the “foo” button go?” Oh right, the AI has magically decided I am better off with it somewhere else. “Why did the interface change completely today?” Oh right, the AI is having a moment. This feels like a usability nightmare. This screams upper-management consultancy, doesnt value the work that goes into design and UX and would love to cream some money by pretending they could fire an entire department.

fragmede 3y ago

Microsoft Office already did the ribbon thing. Time to try it again?

upsidepotential 3y ago

Increasingly likely that UI evolution will prioritize a shift from a "click"-centric approach to one that's "command" oriented. This means AI agents interpreting your instructions and executing task processes, rather than continually reconfiguring the UX to match your preferences. High computing costs with AI also favor instruction-to-task completion dynamic, not just indulging in elaborate screen layout adjustments.

AlienRobot 3y ago

Take a look at one of the linked services https://canonic.dev/ https://canonic.dev/ This is what the future looks like, but without dragging and dropping. It's just a bunch of blocks stacked in grids, columns, and rows. This is what GUI and UX has become. Just black text on white rectangles, because it needs to adapt to every form factor, be accessible, be internationizable, be blahblahblabhlabblahblahblah. It has to be generic. GenUI is the next step in a very depressing trend of sucking out all the color from websites and applications, and just the thought of it happening makes me very sad. I'd have a much better "user experience" if I found a website that turned my cursor into a sword.

victorbjorklund 3y ago

No. This is horrible for UX/UI. No thanks to the app being different for me and different everytime I log in.

devinprater 3y ago

Oh great. So I'll have to tell websites and apps, and Google and Facebook (sign in with), that I'm blind, so that I get an accessible experience? Great.

mattkevan 3y ago

I'm a UX designer and I'm also learning as much as I can about AI, working through courses from Jeremy Howard and Andrej Kaparthy, amongst others. This article is absolute nonsense and I'd expect more from N/N, which I usually respect. Not only does it forget everything about good UX, it also shows a lack of understanding of AI, how it works and where it's useful, treating it like some magic fairy dust that can be sprinkled about and magically solve all problems. A system that completely reconfigures itself based on what it predicts that particular might want, based on biased or incomplete data, sounds like a terrible idea. Support alone would be a nightmare – if the interface changes for each customer, do the guides and videos also change? How would customer support know what the user's looking at? However, I do like the idea of being able to tell a system the result you want, then it showing you the best way to achieve it. For example, few people go to an appliance website to look at washing machines for fun. They go because they want clean socks. A system that could help them find the right machine to clean their particular socks quickly might be valuable. Generative UX sounds fancy but falls apart at the slightest bit of actual thought.

madsbuch 3y ago
I think it would be productive for you to focus on other sources to learn about AI. You are probably better of looking at what people achieve using LLMs and prompting instead of focusing on the fundamentals of probability theory. > A system that completely reconfigures itself based on what it predicts that particular might want, based on biased or incomplete data, sounds like a terrible idea. This sentence shows a quite off understanding of the AI developments for this type of applications. This would be the same as saying that ChatGPT is entirely useless as each character is responds is merely chosen from a probability distribution of the previous characters. While the assessment is technically correct, it diminishes the fact ath it has huge value. I also see that you have a lot of concerns by trying to predict how this affects other parts of a product (customer support, etc.). While I understand that this type of uncertainty is uncomfortable these things usually fan out alright (or at least profitable). A comment like this sound like an 70s postman who says that electronic "internet" would never work because people would not be able to communicate with the rigour of handwritten letters. I am not saying that this article is right or wrong. I merely say that a bit of curiosity would be beneficial when assessing new ideas - that can also be the difference of being in or out of the job market in 4 years.

noAnswer 3y ago

A constantly changing UI was a bad idea when it first got unleashed with Microsoft Office XP and still is a bad idea today! (It should not be confuses with a customizable UI though.) People who suggest this should be forced to work at a IT Helpdesk for the next 1000 years.

ingigauti 3y ago

Couple of weeks ago I published a new programming language, Plang (as in pseudo language), which will allow the user to customize his own UI The window app is mostly a proof of concept for now, as it runs only on Windows, you can see how it works in this video https://youtu.be/RJYv5PUz9bY?si=ZzrXL4HJq7ANL6H6 https://youtu.be/RJYv5PUz9bY?si=ZzrXL4HJq7ANL6H6 The language out self is in natural language, if that interested you, check out https://github.com/plangHQ https://github.com/plangHQ

madsbuch 3y ago

While I don't know how this will manifest in real products there are some insights to why this development is important. These insights come from the huge successes of the LLMs where we are at. The insights is the ability to emit knowledge in different dialects. An example is understand legalese. I am not able to do that as I have no degree in law. But LLMs are hugely effective at taking me through a legal filing and understand what I need to put into each field. The hope is that developments like this will ensure the most efficient interface for a given group of people: Arabic speakers get an interface that take right to left writing into account. Legal people get a language they undrstand and laymen get an interface that caters to them. I see a lot of critical comments around this. In my opinion, this will turn out to be an accessibility thing (Probably mandated by the EU in some years). Just like it is considered good form to support text to speech software for vision impaired people is it today.