5 ms·

What Is Generative UI?

63 points by grouchy 10mo ago

vrighter 10mo ago
it is a case of "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. Microsoft already tried this in office when they made the menu order change with usage frequency. People hated it
- ares623 10mo ago
  But AI?
- bncndn0956 10mo ago
  "Your thumbs will learn" is a famous Steve Jobs quote from the 2007 iPhone launch.
  - bccdee 10mo ago
    Only if the buttons on the iPhone aren't constantly being rearranged by a chatbot. Then they'll never learn.
  - vrighter 10mo ago
    the whole point of this is that the buttons keep moving so your fingers can't learn. When steve jobs said it, he thought about it first and was talking about something different
- grouchy 10mo ago
  I'll be honest, I don't remember this. I'm suggesting you don't generally need menus. The pattern is closer to search like Apple Spotlight or Chrome New Tab... I think most people do that now instead of bookmarks or clicking through menus? Am I wrong?
iterance 10mo ago
Cold take: honestly, just let users learn how to use your software. Put all your options in a consistent location in menus or whatever - it's fine. Yes, it might take them a little bit. No, they won't use every feature. Do make it as easy to learn as possible. Don't alienate the user with UI that changes under their feet. Is "learning" now a synonym of "friction" in the product and design world? I gather this from many modern thinkpieces. If I am wrong, I would like to see an example of this kind of UI that actually feels both learnable and seamless. Clarity, predictability, learnability, reliability, interoperability, are all sacrificed on this altar. > The explosive popularity of AI code generation shows users crave more control and flexibility. I don't see how this follows. The chart with lines and circles is quite thought-leadershipful. I do not perceive meaning in it, however (lines are jagged/bad, circles are smooth/good?).
bccdee 10mo ago
> Users get personalized interfaces without custom code. Personalized interfaces are bad. I don't want to configure anything, and I don't want anything automatically configured on my behalf. I want it to just work; that kind of design takes effort & there's no way around it. Your UI should be clear and predictable. A chatbot should not be moving around the buttons. If I'm going to compare notes with my friend on how to use your software, all the buttons need to be in the same place. People hate UI redesigns for a reason: Once they've learned how to use your software, they don't want to re-learn. A product that constantly redesigns itself at the whims of an inscrutable chatbot which thinks it knows what you want is the worst of all possible products. ALSO: Egregiously written article. I assume it's made by an LLM.
- tartoran 10mo ago
  Yes and this is my biggest anxiety of future software and interfaces to come. You won't remember how you got there or did what because there are n permutations of getting there or doing that, except they're vaguely similar but not exactly the same thing. I too want predictable software (including UIs) that stays the same until I want to change/upgrade it myself as a user.
  - wiseowise 10mo ago
    CLI will always be there, don't worry.
  - brandensilva 10mo ago
    I've heard from users they are burnt out on the UI many apps support. Buggy components everywhere across web, mobile, etc. e.g I can confirm that QuickBooks mobile app has so many bugs still in it for example and it's like 1/10th their web app. I know personally I hit buggy forms and UI way more than I should preventing me from proceeding. So I think there is an opportunity to instead have n permutations in natural language where the interface is consistent towards how the user inputs, it will just be up to the developers to support some UI for confirmation and structuring more complex input within chat itself. The biggest issue will be become discovery of what you can and cannot do without stationary UIs hinting at capabilities. Anyways we are in new territory so it will be interesting how this plays out.i like to think of it as on demand UI but curious how others are toying with this paradigm. We are testing a mostly display only interface for output where the majority of input comes in from chat and chat UI components right now just to see how this would work in practice.
next_xibalba 10mo ago
This is getting panned, probably for good reasons. But, in a similar vein, I really think that generative applications are going to be big in the future. User speaks (or OS predicts) what they want and an app spins up on the fly. I don’t think they’ll wipe out traditional apps, but I could see lots of long tail cases where they meet users needs.
- bccdee 10mo ago
  "Copilot, make me a drawing app." MS Paint opens. "No, Copilot! Make me a drawing app with feature X." Fans turn on. Laptop gets hot. Ten minutes pass as the entire MS Paint codebase is downloaded and recompiled. Finally, MS Paint opens. There's an extra button in the toolbar. It doesn't work.
stanleykm 10mo ago
Cant wait to use a program that changes constantly
averynicepen 10mo ago
I bristled at the title, article contents, and their spreadsheet example, but this does actually touch on a real paint point that I have had - how do you enable power users to learn more powerful tools already present in the software? By corollary, how do you turn more casual users into power users? I do a lot of CAD. Every single keyboard shortcut I know was learned only because I needed to do something that was either *highly repetitive* or *highly frustrating*, leading me to dig into Google and find the fast way to do it. However, everything that is only moderately repetitive/frustrating and below is still being done the simple way. And I've used these programs for years. I have always dreamed of user interfaces having competent, contextual user tutorials that space out learning about advanced and useful features over the entire duration that you use. Video games do this process well, having long since replaced singular "tutorial sections" with a stepped gameplay mechanic rollout that gradually teaches people incredibly complex game mechanics over time. A simple example to counter the auto-configuration interpretation most of the other commenters are thinking of. In a toolbar dropdown, highlight all the features I already know how to use regularly. When you detect me trying to learn a new feature, help me find it, highlight it in a "currently learning" color, and slowly change the highlight color to "learned" in proportion to my muscle memory.
- cheschire 10mo ago
  I break out blender every six months or so in order to create a model for 3d printing. It needs to be precise and often has threads or other repetitive structures. Every. Single. Time. I spend at least the first 3 hours relearning how to use all the tools again with Claude reminding me where modifiers are, and which modifier allows what. And which hotkey slices. Etc etc.
  - grouchy 10mo ago
    I guess what if you had Claude in the app, and it didn't just tell you what to do, it could even surface ephemeral UI for each task? This is really what generative UI would enable.
    - cheschire 10mo ago
mr_windfrog 10mo ago
could this kind of interface make it harder for users to discover useful features they might not know to ask for?
- grouchy 10mo ago
  Good question. When I think about how people actually discover features, it's usually: 1) clicking through menus 2) reading docs/watching tutorials 3) getting hands-on help from a coworker or support person Some apps try to do progressive disclosure as you get better at using them, but that's really hard to scale. Works okay for simpler apps but breaks down as complexity grows. With generative UI, I think you're basically building option 3 directly into the app. Users learn to just ask the app how to do something or describe their problem, and it surfaces the right tools or configures things for them. Still early days though. I think users will also have to adopt new behaviors to get the most out of generative apps.
jan_Sate 10mo ago
That's a bad idea. It isn't deterministic. How do you even make documentation for users for your generative UI? It looks different for every single user.
- grouchy 10mo ago
  Why do we need documentation?
jrm4 10mo ago
Here's why this is silly: Most UI's are fundamentally dumbed down, they're only good for repetitive tasks. If you're doing any task that is non-repetitive enough such that the UI needs to change, what you really need or would like is an "assistant" who you can talk through, get feedback, and do the thing. Up until very recently, that assistant probably had to be human, but probably obviously, people are now working quite a bit on the virtual one.
jmward01 10mo ago
I tell people we have inverted control with the latest agent concepts. Instead of deterministic code treating LLMs as functions, we have LLMs determining the flow of the app and the interaction with the user. It is much more organic when it is done right and you can gain access to features you never coded. We have been implementing UI tools/widgets to allow a much more interactive experience and it is amazing to play with that idea. This will obviously be part of the standard toolkit of agentic software a year or two from now. The agent stack is just now forming and UI is a core piece of it.
dmje 10mo ago
On the face of it, this seems like a terrible idea. Interesting, but terrible. I’ve spent 30 years encouraging simple, repeatable, user-focused UI’s where hierarchies are explicit, pages are referenceable, search results are real URLs and so on. Randomness is generally bad - humans expect X module or block or whatever to be in the same place from visit to visit, not adapting based on some complex algorithm that “learns”. UX and UI takes work, and it’s mostly work getting back to simplicity - things like “think more like a user and less like your organisation” in terms of naming conventions and structures, or making sure that content works harder than navigation in orienting users. I don’t think there’s any sort of quick fix here, it’s hard to get it right. Simplicity is surprisingly complex :-)
- Closi 10mo ago
  There is a trade off with simplicity though - usually it requires being highly opinionated about which software features make the cut. Users or sales teams often want more features, but if you included every one the app would become a mess. But there is a possible world where you can have both - every 'feature' your users would ever want without overwhelming complexity or steep learning curves, but with the possible downside/cost of reducing consistency.
- grouchy 10mo ago
  I don't disagree that simple and repeatable wins—but isn't there a tension between "simple" and "capable"? Excel is neither simple nor explicit, yet it's the most successful end-user programming tool ever made. Could generative UI be a path to creating powerful tools feel simple by hiding complexity until needed, rather than dumbing down the tool itself?
deckar01 10mo ago
Plotly just shut off their Chart Studio web app and “replaced” it with a desktop app called Studio. That desktop app requires LLM chat input for every action. It uses this pattern and trying to figure out the magic words to make it do the basic tasks you have been doing with 3 clicks for the last decade is infuriating. Especially when you realize your data was local to your browser tab unless you saved it before and now it is unconditionally uploaded to a remote server with no obvious way to delete the data.
- grouchy 10mo ago
  Forcing chat for every action when direct UI interactions worked fine is definitely not what I'm advocating. I'm arguing for isn't chat-only interfaces. It's giving users both options: use the UI directly for quick changes you already know how to make, chat when you don't know where to find something or you have a complex multi-step task. Different users will prefer different methods for different tasks. The goal is software that works how the user wants it to work, not just optimized for one interaction style. Remote LLMs is a real constraint right now. I'm hoping for a class of generative apps that can be run entirely locally. I believe it will exist, just not right now.
claytongulick 10mo ago
One of the key elements of effective UX is discoverability. The user needs to able to discover the capabilities and limitations of the system they are using. For most practical examples I can think of, this approach would complicate that, if not make it nearly impossible.
- grouchy 10mo ago
  I'm curious what makes you say this? I feel like I discover how most sufficiently complex apps work by googling, or youtube. I'm also not convinced this makes traditional methods: walkthroughs, support videos, trainings etc impossible? My friend just discovered coding agents (lol), and he's constantly finding new things it can do for him... "Oh it can ssh into my raspberrypi and run the code to test it. Wow" That was an emergent property of the cli coding agent that had no "traditional" discoverability.
  - claytongulick 10mo ago
    A teacher that needs to know the kids that are struggling the most with a recent exam doesn't want to ask the AI 10 different ways, deal with hallucinations and frustrations, send tech support a ticket only to receive a response that the MCP doesn't support that yet - isn't going to be impressed. They just want to see a menu of available reports, and if the one they want isn't there, move on to a different way of doing what they need.
citizenpaul 10mo ago
Stuff like this guarantees future dev work. Its the new institutional spreadsheet mess.
- wiseowise 10mo ago
  > Stuff like this guarantees future dev work. Don't worry, it'll be done by more LLMs.
fathermarz 10mo ago
In theory this seems like a reasonable solution, but in practice, it really is impossible. Is the help documentation going to be generative too? Or can I only ask a chatbot? Secondly, the concrete example is not generative UI, it’s just generated data getting put into a schema. I think the hard part of design is that you must consider the trade off between a new user and a power user. Overwhelm against progressive disclosure. It’s an art form in and of itself.
- grouchy 10mo ago
  These apps will likely require extensive documentation. The question is: Why expose it to the user if you can use an LLM to surface only the relevant information, contextualized to what they are doing? We use this in our app, and it reads our docs to provide context when rendering the UI. I hope that most users never actually read our docs, and eventually learn to ask our app. It can generally show the right UI, help them configure it, and use docs to ground it.
mraduldeodhiya 10mo ago
Thanks for sharing this.
- grouchy 10mo ago
  ofc!
mawadev 10mo ago
The case against complex UI hides the fact that nobody wants to take their time to learn a piece of software anymore. Attention spans are so short, if the system doesn't do all the thinking for you, why bother with it? We are just moving the human laziness through another layer of indirection. The fact never changed in the past 30 years: some domains are complicated and you need smart people on both ends who can bridge the gaps. The dream has always been the same with nocode, lowcode and whatever, it doesn't change this fundamental flaw. Consider building your own blender software. If you know nothing about 3D you start off in your language and the LLM will happily produce UI for your level of understanding, which is limited. Over time you will reach an understanding that looks just like the software you were trying to replicate. Currently the ecosystem around UI changes so much, because its always been a solved problem that people just keep reinventing to have... something to do I guess?
- wiseowise 10mo ago
  > The case against complex UI hides the fact that nobody wants to take their time to learn a piece of software anymore. Attention spans are so short, if the system doesn't do all the thinking for you, why bother with it? We are just moving the human laziness through another layer of indirection. The fact never changed in the past 30 years: some domains are complicated and you need smart people on both ends who can bridge the gaps. The dream has always been the same with nocode, lowcode and whatever, it doesn't change this fundamental flaw. This has nothing to do with laziness or attention span. 20 years ago you'd have maybe a dozen programs tops to juggle and they were much better designed, because they were made by people who actually use the software instead of some bored designer at FAANG sweatshop who operates on metrics. Now you have 3-5 chat clients, 20 different web UIs for everything on 3 different OSs, all with different shortcuts. And on top of that it CONSTANTLY changes (looking at you Android and material 3). 5 things deserve knowing in-depth: browser (not a specific website, but browser itself), text editor, Spreadsheet application, terminal and whatever else software you use to put a bread on your table. For any VCs that seriously think I'll invest non-trivial amount of time into learning their unique™ software – you're delusional. Provide shortcuts that resemble browser/vim/emacs/vscode and don't waste yours and my time.
- ramon156 10mo ago
sarreph 10mo ago
We’re working on something adjacent to this[0] by making fluid UIs for public (marketing landing content) front ends. AI allows even compiled code to be arbitrarily modified on the fly, and it’s only going to get easier to start with a “base” of content, functionality, and components - and compose the best outcome for a user. [0] - https://kenobi.ai https://kenobi.ai
- grouchy 10mo ago
  Interesting. I tried the demo and couldn't get it to work. What are you using to modify the site for each person? I can see how you personalize software with use, but how do you personalize a landing page before you have any user context?
pshirshov 10mo ago
To me that agentic spreadsheet example looks more like some degenerative UI.
- grouchy 10mo ago
  Good wordplay. It's for sure a toy. It's hard to re-implement an entire spreadsheet. What about it did you not like?
bsenftner 10mo ago
This smells a lot like "Script X" - a 90's era collaboration between IBM and Apple, but for end-users. Back in the early-mid 90’s Apple Computer and IBM and I seem to remember some other tech nonsense peddlers formed a joint venture (I'm not looking this up, all from memory), with a name something like Talagent, forgettable. But their product was supposedly this uber-duper new non-language that was going to completely take over software development. Named “Script-X” it starts with each programmer defining the language they want to use, the syntax and whatnot of the language itself, and then they work in blissful joy writing code in the style they prefer to write code. I cannot believe they actually managed to create a joint venture, mount a huge industry PR campaign, and start selling this utter shite without thinking this pure idiocy through… No two programmers working on the same project could read one another’s code. The developers spent a large amount of time changing their minds’ on the specifics of the “optimal language they wanted”, which caused previous work to be incompatible to the language and that programmer who chose to change their programming mental model. Not a single project using their Script-X shipped, it was a total and complete failure. I was at Philips Media while this was taking place, and being a little software language author myself, I watched this playout with dismay these participants could be so short sighted.
StellarScience 10mo ago
I've been writing complex scientific UIs for more than two decades and still don't feel like I always get it right. We aim for "gradual reveal" and making the most common options easy to find and use, but it's hard to get that right for everyone. Microsoft tried hiding less commonly-used menu options a decade or so with Office and it was so terrible they abandoned it - only to try the same approach with the Windows 11 Explorer menu. I absolutely hate that rigid "Basic" vs. "Advanced" distinction, but one of our image processing UIs was so complicated a customer really pressed us to add that. We tried and tried and couldn't come up with something better, so we settled on an approach that I still feel is suboptimal. So I welcome seeing what AI/LLMs may be able to contribute to the UI design space, and customizing per user based on their usage seems like an interesting experiment. But at the same time I'm skeptical that AI will really excel in this very human and subjective area.
- grouchy 10mo ago
  I agree that the basic vs. advanced or persona A vs. persona B distinction is usually too rigid. What makes you skeptical that AI will excel at this?
  - StellarScience 10mo ago
    The AI spreadsheet example in the linked article is interesting, but that occurs within a more specialized and constrained environment than general GUI design. I think of good UI design as involving a lot of human factors understanding combined with 2D spatial reasoning and layout, which I don't think AI is good at. (Today's article about Claude failing to reproduce an HTML layout to match a screen capture is one example of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183294 ) But my pessimism may be unfounded or based on ignorance. At some point AI will probably get better at these things as well, either with better LLMs or by augmenting LLMs with outboard spatial reasoning modules that they can interact with.
OptionOfT 10mo ago
UI has really gotten down in the last couple of years. Reduced information density Abuse of paradigms we learned in the past (e.g. blue button to accept, links for decline) to make us accept harmful settings Notifications for just about everything Popups inside of the app Adding buttons for functionality that's not included in your subscription, which show the nagscreen once you click on it UI upgrades which add nothing (see all above) Removal of agency. I don't want the upgrade, nor do I want to be reminded in 3 days. A changing UI sounds absolute hell to me. When I was growing up I broke my Windows installation a lot by changing settings. That's how I learned.

63 points by grouchy 10mo ago

it is a case of "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. Microsoft already tried this in office when they made the menu order change with usage frequency. People hated it

ares623 10mo ago
But AI?
bncndn0956 10mo ago
"Your thumbs will learn" is a famous Steve Jobs quote from the 2007 iPhone launch.
- bccdee 10mo ago
  Only if the buttons on the iPhone aren't constantly being rearranged by a chatbot. Then they'll never learn.
- vrighter 10mo ago
  the whole point of this is that the buttons keep moving so your fingers can't learn. When steve jobs said it, he thought about it first and was talking about something different
grouchy 10mo ago
I'll be honest, I don't remember this. I'm suggesting you don't generally need menus. The pattern is closer to search like Apple Spotlight or Chrome New Tab... I think most people do that now instead of bookmarks or clicking through menus? Am I wrong?

iterance 10mo ago

Cold take: honestly, just let users learn how to use your software. Put all your options in a consistent location in menus or whatever - it's fine. Yes, it might take them a little bit. No, they won't use every feature. Do make it as easy to learn as possible. Don't alienate the user with UI that changes under their feet. Is "learning" now a synonym of "friction" in the product and design world? I gather this from many modern thinkpieces. If I am wrong, I would like to see an example of this kind of UI that actually feels both learnable and seamless. Clarity, predictability, learnability, reliability, interoperability, are all sacrificed on this altar. > The explosive popularity of AI code generation shows users crave more control and flexibility. I don't see how this follows. The chart with lines and circles is quite thought-leadershipful. I do not perceive meaning in it, however (lines are jagged/bad, circles are smooth/good?).

bccdee 10mo ago

> Users get personalized interfaces without custom code. Personalized interfaces are bad. I don't want to configure anything, and I don't want anything automatically configured on my behalf. I want it to just work; that kind of design takes effort & there's no way around it. Your UI should be clear and predictable. A chatbot should not be moving around the buttons. If I'm going to compare notes with my friend on how to use your software, all the buttons need to be in the same place. People hate UI redesigns for a reason: Once they've learned how to use your software, they don't want to re-learn. A product that constantly redesigns itself at the whims of an inscrutable chatbot which thinks it knows what you want is the worst of all possible products. ALSO: Egregiously written article. I assume it's made by an LLM.

tartoran 10mo ago
Yes and this is my biggest anxiety of future software and interfaces to come. You won't remember how you got there or did what because there are n permutations of getting there or doing that, except they're vaguely similar but not exactly the same thing. I too want predictable software (including UIs) that stays the same until I want to change/upgrade it myself as a user.
- wiseowise 10mo ago
  CLI will always be there, don't worry.
- brandensilva 10mo ago
  I've heard from users they are burnt out on the UI many apps support. Buggy components everywhere across web, mobile, etc. e.g I can confirm that QuickBooks mobile app has so many bugs still in it for example and it's like 1/10th their web app. I know personally I hit buggy forms and UI way more than I should preventing me from proceeding. So I think there is an opportunity to instead have n permutations in natural language where the interface is consistent towards how the user inputs, it will just be up to the developers to support some UI for confirmation and structuring more complex input within chat itself. The biggest issue will be become discovery of what you can and cannot do without stationary UIs hinting at capabilities. Anyways we are in new territory so it will be interesting how this plays out.i like to think of it as on demand UI but curious how others are toying with this paradigm. We are testing a mostly display only interface for output where the majority of input comes in from chat and chat UI components right now just to see how this would work in practice.

next_xibalba 10mo ago

This is getting panned, probably for good reasons. But, in a similar vein, I really think that generative applications are going to be big in the future. User speaks (or OS predicts) what they want and an app spins up on the fly. I don’t think they’ll wipe out traditional apps, but I could see lots of long tail cases where they meet users needs.

bccdee 10mo ago
"Copilot, make me a drawing app." MS Paint opens. "No, Copilot! Make me a drawing app with feature X." Fans turn on. Laptop gets hot. Ten minutes pass as the entire MS Paint codebase is downloaded and recompiled. Finally, MS Paint opens. There's an extra button in the toolbar. It doesn't work.

stanleykm 10mo ago

Cant wait to use a program that changes constantly

averynicepen 10mo ago

I bristled at the title, article contents, and their spreadsheet example, but this does actually touch on a real paint point that I have had - how do you enable power users to learn more powerful tools already present in the software? By corollary, how do you turn more casual users into power users? I do a lot of CAD. Every single keyboard shortcut I know was learned only because I needed to do something that was either *highly repetitive* or *highly frustrating*, leading me to dig into Google and find the fast way to do it. However, everything that is only moderately repetitive/frustrating and below is still being done the simple way. And I've used these programs for years. I have always dreamed of user interfaces having competent, contextual user tutorials that space out learning about advanced and useful features over the entire duration that you use. Video games do this process well, having long since replaced singular "tutorial sections" with a stepped gameplay mechanic rollout that gradually teaches people incredibly complex game mechanics over time. A simple example to counter the auto-configuration interpretation most of the other commenters are thinking of. In a toolbar dropdown, highlight all the features I already know how to use regularly. When you detect me trying to learn a new feature, help me find it, highlight it in a "currently learning" color, and slowly change the highlight color to "learned" in proportion to my muscle memory.

cheschire 10mo ago
I break out blender every six months or so in order to create a model for 3d printing. It needs to be precise and often has threads or other repetitive structures. Every. Single. Time. I spend at least the first 3 hours relearning how to use all the tools again with Claude reminding me where modifiers are, and which modifier allows what. And which hotkey slices. Etc etc.
- grouchy 10mo ago
  I guess what if you had Claude in the app, and it didn't just tell you what to do, it could even surface ephemeral UI for each task? This is really what generative UI would enable.
  - cheschire 10mo ago

mr_windfrog 10mo ago

could this kind of interface make it harder for users to discover useful features they might not know to ask for?

grouchy 10mo ago
Good question. When I think about how people actually discover features, it's usually: 1) clicking through menus 2) reading docs/watching tutorials 3) getting hands-on help from a coworker or support person Some apps try to do progressive disclosure as you get better at using them, but that's really hard to scale. Works okay for simpler apps but breaks down as complexity grows. With generative UI, I think you're basically building option 3 directly into the app. Users learn to just ask the app how to do something or describe their problem, and it surfaces the right tools or configures things for them. Still early days though. I think users will also have to adopt new behaviors to get the most out of generative apps.

jan_Sate 10mo ago

That's a bad idea. It isn't deterministic. How do you even make documentation for users for your generative UI? It looks different for every single user.

grouchy 10mo ago
Why do we need documentation?

jrm4 10mo ago

Here's why this is silly: Most UI's are fundamentally dumbed down, they're only good for repetitive tasks. If you're doing any task that is non-repetitive enough such that the UI needs to change, what you really need or would like is an "assistant" who you can talk through, get feedback, and do the thing. Up until very recently, that assistant probably had to be human, but probably obviously, people are now working quite a bit on the virtual one.

jmward01 10mo ago

I tell people we have inverted control with the latest agent concepts. Instead of deterministic code treating LLMs as functions, we have LLMs determining the flow of the app and the interaction with the user. It is much more organic when it is done right and you can gain access to features you never coded. We have been implementing UI tools/widgets to allow a much more interactive experience and it is amazing to play with that idea. This will obviously be part of the standard toolkit of agentic software a year or two from now. The agent stack is just now forming and UI is a core piece of it.

dmje 10mo ago

On the face of it, this seems like a terrible idea. Interesting, but terrible. I’ve spent 30 years encouraging simple, repeatable, user-focused UI’s where hierarchies are explicit, pages are referenceable, search results are real URLs and so on. Randomness is generally bad - humans expect X module or block or whatever to be in the same place from visit to visit, not adapting based on some complex algorithm that “learns”. UX and UI takes work, and it’s mostly work getting back to simplicity - things like “think more like a user and less like your organisation” in terms of naming conventions and structures, or making sure that content works harder than navigation in orienting users. I don’t think there’s any sort of quick fix here, it’s hard to get it right. Simplicity is surprisingly complex :-)

Closi 10mo ago
There is a trade off with simplicity though - usually it requires being highly opinionated about which software features make the cut. Users or sales teams often want more features, but if you included every one the app would become a mess. But there is a possible world where you can have both - every 'feature' your users would ever want without overwhelming complexity or steep learning curves, but with the possible downside/cost of reducing consistency.
grouchy 10mo ago
I don't disagree that simple and repeatable wins—but isn't there a tension between "simple" and "capable"? Excel is neither simple nor explicit, yet it's the most successful end-user programming tool ever made. Could generative UI be a path to creating powerful tools feel simple by hiding complexity until needed, rather than dumbing down the tool itself?

deckar01 10mo ago

Plotly just shut off their Chart Studio web app and “replaced” it with a desktop app called Studio. That desktop app requires LLM chat input for every action. It uses this pattern and trying to figure out the magic words to make it do the basic tasks you have been doing with 3 clicks for the last decade is infuriating. Especially when you realize your data was local to your browser tab unless you saved it before and now it is unconditionally uploaded to a remote server with no obvious way to delete the data.

grouchy 10mo ago
Forcing chat for every action when direct UI interactions worked fine is definitely not what I'm advocating. I'm arguing for isn't chat-only interfaces. It's giving users both options: use the UI directly for quick changes you already know how to make, chat when you don't know where to find something or you have a complex multi-step task. Different users will prefer different methods for different tasks. The goal is software that works how the user wants it to work, not just optimized for one interaction style. Remote LLMs is a real constraint right now. I'm hoping for a class of generative apps that can be run entirely locally. I believe it will exist, just not right now.

claytongulick 10mo ago

One of the key elements of effective UX is discoverability. The user needs to able to discover the capabilities and limitations of the system they are using. For most practical examples I can think of, this approach would complicate that, if not make it nearly impossible.

grouchy 10mo ago
I'm curious what makes you say this? I feel like I discover how most sufficiently complex apps work by googling, or youtube. I'm also not convinced this makes traditional methods: walkthroughs, support videos, trainings etc impossible? My friend just discovered coding agents (lol), and he's constantly finding new things it can do for him... "Oh it can ssh into my raspberrypi and run the code to test it. Wow" That was an emergent property of the cli coding agent that had no "traditional" discoverability.
- claytongulick 10mo ago
  A teacher that needs to know the kids that are struggling the most with a recent exam doesn't want to ask the AI 10 different ways, deal with hallucinations and frustrations, send tech support a ticket only to receive a response that the MCP doesn't support that yet - isn't going to be impressed. They just want to see a menu of available reports, and if the one they want isn't there, move on to a different way of doing what they need.

citizenpaul 10mo ago

Stuff like this guarantees future dev work. Its the new institutional spreadsheet mess.

wiseowise 10mo ago
> Stuff like this guarantees future dev work. Don't worry, it'll be done by more LLMs.

fathermarz 10mo ago

In theory this seems like a reasonable solution, but in practice, it really is impossible. Is the help documentation going to be generative too? Or can I only ask a chatbot? Secondly, the concrete example is not generative UI, it’s just generated data getting put into a schema. I think the hard part of design is that you must consider the trade off between a new user and a power user. Overwhelm against progressive disclosure. It’s an art form in and of itself.

grouchy 10mo ago
These apps will likely require extensive documentation. The question is: Why expose it to the user if you can use an LLM to surface only the relevant information, contextualized to what they are doing? We use this in our app, and it reads our docs to provide context when rendering the UI. I hope that most users never actually read our docs, and eventually learn to ask our app. It can generally show the right UI, help them configure it, and use docs to ground it.

mraduldeodhiya 10mo ago

Thanks for sharing this.

grouchy 10mo ago
ofc!

mawadev 10mo ago

The case against complex UI hides the fact that nobody wants to take their time to learn a piece of software anymore. Attention spans are so short, if the system doesn't do all the thinking for you, why bother with it? We are just moving the human laziness through another layer of indirection. The fact never changed in the past 30 years: some domains are complicated and you need smart people on both ends who can bridge the gaps. The dream has always been the same with nocode, lowcode and whatever, it doesn't change this fundamental flaw. Consider building your own blender software. If you know nothing about 3D you start off in your language and the LLM will happily produce UI for your level of understanding, which is limited. Over time you will reach an understanding that looks just like the software you were trying to replicate. Currently the ecosystem around UI changes so much, because its always been a solved problem that people just keep reinventing to have... something to do I guess?

wiseowise 10mo ago
> The case against complex UI hides the fact that nobody wants to take their time to learn a piece of software anymore. Attention spans are so short, if the system doesn't do all the thinking for you, why bother with it? We are just moving the human laziness through another layer of indirection. The fact never changed in the past 30 years: some domains are complicated and you need smart people on both ends who can bridge the gaps. The dream has always been the same with nocode, lowcode and whatever, it doesn't change this fundamental flaw. This has nothing to do with laziness or attention span. 20 years ago you'd have maybe a dozen programs tops to juggle and they were much better designed, because they were made by people who actually use the software instead of some bored designer at FAANG sweatshop who operates on metrics. Now you have 3-5 chat clients, 20 different web UIs for everything on 3 different OSs, all with different shortcuts. And on top of that it CONSTANTLY changes (looking at you Android and material 3). 5 things deserve knowing in-depth: browser (not a specific website, but browser itself), text editor, Spreadsheet application, terminal and whatever else software you use to put a bread on your table. For any VCs that seriously think I'll invest non-trivial amount of time into learning their unique™ software – you're delusional. Provide shortcuts that resemble browser/vim/emacs/vscode and don't waste yours and my time.
ramon156 10mo ago

sarreph 10mo ago

We’re working on something adjacent to this[0] by making fluid UIs for public (marketing landing content) front ends. AI allows even compiled code to be arbitrarily modified on the fly, and it’s only going to get easier to start with a “base” of content, functionality, and components - and compose the best outcome for a user. [0] - https://kenobi.ai https://kenobi.ai

grouchy 10mo ago
Interesting. I tried the demo and couldn't get it to work. What are you using to modify the site for each person? I can see how you personalize software with use, but how do you personalize a landing page before you have any user context?

pshirshov 10mo ago

To me that agentic spreadsheet example looks more like some degenerative UI.

grouchy 10mo ago
Good wordplay. It's for sure a toy. It's hard to re-implement an entire spreadsheet. What about it did you not like?

bsenftner 10mo ago

This smells a lot like "Script X" - a 90's era collaboration between IBM and Apple, but for end-users. Back in the early-mid 90’s Apple Computer and IBM and I seem to remember some other tech nonsense peddlers formed a joint venture (I'm not looking this up, all from memory), with a name something like Talagent, forgettable. But their product was supposedly this uber-duper new non-language that was going to completely take over software development. Named “Script-X” it starts with each programmer defining the language they want to use, the syntax and whatnot of the language itself, and then they work in blissful joy writing code in the style they prefer to write code. I cannot believe they actually managed to create a joint venture, mount a huge industry PR campaign, and start selling this utter shite without thinking this pure idiocy through… No two programmers working on the same project could read one another’s code. The developers spent a large amount of time changing their minds’ on the specifics of the “optimal language they wanted”, which caused previous work to be incompatible to the language and that programmer who chose to change their programming mental model. Not a single project using their Script-X shipped, it was a total and complete failure. I was at Philips Media while this was taking place, and being a little software language author myself, I watched this playout with dismay these participants could be so short sighted.

StellarScience 10mo ago

I've been writing complex scientific UIs for more than two decades and still don't feel like I always get it right. We aim for "gradual reveal" and making the most common options easy to find and use, but it's hard to get that right for everyone. Microsoft tried hiding less commonly-used menu options a decade or so with Office and it was so terrible they abandoned it - only to try the same approach with the Windows 11 Explorer menu. I absolutely hate that rigid "Basic" vs. "Advanced" distinction, but one of our image processing UIs was so complicated a customer really pressed us to add that. We tried and tried and couldn't come up with something better, so we settled on an approach that I still feel is suboptimal. So I welcome seeing what AI/LLMs may be able to contribute to the UI design space, and customizing per user based on their usage seems like an interesting experiment. But at the same time I'm skeptical that AI will really excel in this very human and subjective area.

grouchy 10mo ago
I agree that the basic vs. advanced or persona A vs. persona B distinction is usually too rigid. What makes you skeptical that AI will excel at this?
- StellarScience 10mo ago
  The AI spreadsheet example in the linked article is interesting, but that occurs within a more specialized and constrained environment than general GUI design. I think of good UI design as involving a lot of human factors understanding combined with 2D spatial reasoning and layout, which I don't think AI is good at. (Today's article about Claude failing to reproduce an HTML layout to match a screen capture is one example of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183294 ) But my pessimism may be unfounded or based on ignorance. At some point AI will probably get better at these things as well, either with better LLMs or by augmenting LLMs with outboard spatial reasoning modules that they can interact with.

OptionOfT 10mo ago

UI has really gotten down in the last couple of years. Reduced information density Abuse of paradigms we learned in the past (e.g. blue button to accept, links for decline) to make us accept harmful settings Notifications for just about everything Popups inside of the app Adding buttons for functionality that's not included in your subscription, which show the nagscreen once you click on it UI upgrades which add nothing (see all above) Removal of agency. I don't want the upgrade, nor do I want to be reminded in 3 days. A changing UI sounds absolute hell to me. When I was growing up I broke my Windows installation a lot by changing settings. That's how I learned.