
AI Will Eat UI - artyomavanesov
http://www.artyomavanesov.com/blog/how-ai-will-eat-ui
======
DivisionSol
Hard disagree, at least, for the next 5 years. We’re still struggling to
maintain “previous version” information density and “previous version”
performance in all the various websites and apps that are undergoing
redesigns.

An AI will not predict when I want to draw a construction line in Fusion360
and automatically select or display a clickable widget in a suitable and
predictable manner. The correct choice is to give lots of options, visible at
a glance, with hotkeys they are reconfigurable.

I lament the day that unpredictable icons line a toolbar changing as often as
I change a tool. And this whole discussion happens independent of the styling
desires a company wishes to exert, with smooth transitions, animated modals,
etc.

Maybe I’ll eat my hat within 5 years, but it’ll be because it has been forced
upon us instead of any actual user experience feedback.

~~~
hinkley
Have we simply given up on QA?

Determinism in a system has been a cornerstone of validation. Even outside of
software circles (the term 'test fixture' originally referred to a contraption
you fitted hardware into to serve as a mock 'environment' for testing, which
could fake inputs and/or register outputs).

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_bxg1
This is a pretty awful take.

\- AI surely has a place in design tooling, but designing UIs from the ground-
up without human intervention would require a deep understanding of both human
psychology and the domain at hand, which I really think would require
artificial general intelligence.

\- We're still leagues away from AGI.

\- Is the author suggesting that UIs will restructure themselves in real time
under subconscious feedback from the user? There is nothing that makes a UI
more anxiety-inducing than unpredictability and inconsistency. The idea of a
UI that's constantly in flux _by design_ is, in a word, hilarious.

\- That Autodesk feature doesn't even have anything to do with AI, from what I
can tell. It's just a fancy constraint solver.

~~~
birdyrooster
Your third point doesn't seem that hilarious to me. What is wrong with a UI
that is constantly trying to predict what is best for you? It doesn't
necessarily mean that the flux will be chaotic or unwanted. I can imagine a UI
which changes slightly based on how difficult it is for me to find what I am
looking for. Not one which changes so often that it is it's own problem, but
one which changes often enough to reduce some of the pain points in my
workflows.

~~~
daotoad
Automatically changing interfaces are terrible.

Static menus are faster that magically changing menus. People want to know
where to click to do a thing.

User customizable menus can be faster (when used well) than static menus.

Here's a study:
[http://user.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~tcan/se705/Schedule/assignment...](http://user.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~tcan/se705/Schedule/assignment6.pdf)

IMO, you'd get more mileage out of a menu with "Frequently used commands" that
you can lock items into than with an AI rearranging stuff. And the algorithm
is much simpler.

The hard part in UI is discoverability not repeatability. We would be wise to
develop an easy to use workflow for finding commands based on what the user
wants to do. Natural language processing could help here. Find a command: user
types "How do I draw a box around some text". The search results should show
where to find each command in nested menus, and be able to play an animated
workflow example. An AI solution could help a user sift through a result set
and find the choice that best matches their needs (for the box example, one
way to add a box would be to turn on a border for a given paragraph, another
way to get a box would be to add a free-form vector rectangle, positioned on
the page).

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jariel
"By measuring our heart rate, respiration, pupil size, and eye movement, our
AI’s will be able to map our psychology in high resolution. And armed with
this information, our interfaces will morph and adapt to our mood as we go
about our day."

Totally disagree.

Consistency is one of the primary foundations of UI, and most adaptions made
today are really quite problematic.

They haven't really given any examples of either this specific prediction, or
even the predictions at large.

Second is the issue of integration - our homes could all be fully automated
today if we could agree on a bunch of protocols, but we don't.

Shoot - even our mail is stolen from our porches because we can't get our act
together on 'lock box' situations for the neighbourhood etc..

There's no practical reason to have my pulse, sweat, stress levels perpetually
monitored, let alone have that integrated into some arbitrary app so they can
adjust the ads I see.

So no.

This is 'peak AI hype' kind of stuff.

------
achow
The overwhelming sentiment in comments seems to be dismissive.

However, I can see how one day "AI" can easily generate automatically a very
functional User Interface for enterprise software - think Oracle, SAP etc.
Point it to a DB, then prescribe what UI style guide and it can totally
generate a functional and perhaps even a beautiful web or mobile app.

And if we think about it - it can also perhaps generate 99% of all the
websites that exists today (news, landing pages, blogs...).

------
swalls
AI for helping you design and test UX, perhaps. I could see ML being used to
'simulate' eye tracking (and I'll bet some startup is working on that
already).

But morphing UI based on subconcious behaviour, I'm not buying it. Short of
actual mind reading, there isn't enough information in those to make a change
in UI be consistent. Is my heart rate increasing a sign that I want the lasso
tool in Photoshop? I don't think so.

------
daotoad
Just Plain Wrong:

Reason 1: Generative Design is a horrible basis for building UIs.

GD requires a well understood model of how the design needs to operate and be
built (ie, physics + specifications + machine tool kinematics). We don't have
a physics of UI design. GD makes weird, ugly stuff.

Reason 2: Do you not remember how awful Clippy was?

See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant)

TLDR Extract: The program was widely reviled among users as intrusive and
annoying,[22][23] and was criticized even within Microsoft... Smithsonian
Magazine called Clippit "one of the worst software design blunders in the
annals of computing".

Reason 3: Also brought to you by Microsoft: the UI Hell of Adaptive Menus in
Office 2000.

See:
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/10/10/combatin...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2005/10/10/combating-
the-perception-of-bloat-why-the-ui-part-3-2/)

TLDR Extract: Adaptive Menus were not successful. In my opinion, they actually
add complexity to the interface...Auto-customization, unless it does a perfect
job, is usually worse than no customization at all.

~~~
artyomavanesov
It's not about rearranging menu-items, but rather learning how an individual
user could optimally interact with an application and then tailoring the
interface accordingly.

If you visit booking.com it's unlikely you'll ever see the same website twice.
It's because their product team does continuous design and A/B testing, trying
to come up with the best one-size-fits-all solution. If this loop of designing
and testing were to be automated, UIs could be designed based on individual
user data rather than aggregate.

The premise is that just like our content feeds (e.g. Facebook, YouTube
autoplay) are unique, so will our context (i.e. interface) become unique.

~~~
daotoad
Define optimally. Seriously, there is always going to be some easily
measurable value(s) that will operate as a proxy for "optimal". Even if the
model perfectly maximizes the goodness of the proxy values for every customer,
the model will still be wrong inasmuch as the proxies are divorced from the
actual "optimal". Also, if optimal-ness is focused entirely on maximizing
revenue under the current model, the result will be a an automated user-abuse
mechanism that entraps the user and forces them to put up with a horrible
experience just to eke out a 3% boost in ad impressions and the 0.003% boost
in clicks that generates.

And I hate, hate, hate that aspect of Facebook. God forbid you should ever
want to find a post a second time. God forbid I should see posts from my
friends in a timely manner. Nah, show me posts from banks and cell phone
companies that I will not do business with, ever, and show them 50 times.

YouTube Autoplay is a pain in my ass that I keep having to disable.

It's too bad we weren't responsible enough to manage Usenet and email in a
Spam-free way. Now we've driven ourselves into a walled-garden, crappy version
of Usenet with proprietary clients that serve only the site operators. At
least we know where the spam comes from...

~~~
artyomavanesov
When it comes to Facebook someone is already making the decision about the
optimal balance between content and ads. However, currently this decision is
at least to some extent made on aggregate.

As a result, some users get so turned off by ads that they leave the platform,
whereas others continue using a it because they don't regard ads as (such high
of) a cost.

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imvetri
Will see about that.

