> 37signals differentiates their products with opinionated UI/UX, not novel features. They are rewriting Hey as six native apps because the web fidelity isn’t good enough. So UI matters enough to justify complete rewrites, but also everyone just wants CLIs?
I've seen this one a few times lately. People should stop building UIs, nobody wants to interact with a UI. Everyone's app should just be an API that you can use with a chatbot. Except for my app — my app is a handcrafted miracle of artisanal UX and its UI will change the way you see the world.
It's exactly the old argument, just now with LLMs in the place of shell pipelines: in terms of functionality and value to users, software ought to be malleable and composable. We've known it since the eighties. But the model of selling a piece of software as a product as if it were a pair of shoes is incompatible with that. You need a big monolithic application to justify users paying a bunch of money for it, and you need it to have a fancy interface that makes an impression. And the whole software industry is built on top of that model. Where monolithic software is completely unfit for a purpose, like when it needs to be a component of a larger system, we rely on (mostly unpaid) OSS.
Except now LLMs let you, with very little technical know-how, plaster a ‘programmable’ interface on top of unstructured data/interface meant for humans, and because that's what we actually want, of course everybody does that. So the end result is a wildly expensive pipeline from API to UI and back to API again. I wonder how long the legacy ‘human-oriented’ layer in the middle, and the industry that's been built on top of it, will last.
(Separately, chatbots are not great as a UI for most things, and the problem of building the universal UI still also stands. But it turns out for a lot of things people would rather have a bad universal UI than a good special-purpose UI for each task.)
I think the popularity of these chat interfaces disagrees with that to some extent. We do already have malleable software for people who can program — the problem has always been bringing it to everyone else.
Leas surprise is one good way of putting it. Intuitiv, dead simple, most familiar, and idiot proof are others.
I still Don‘t Make Me Think is the best guide for developing interfaces for non technical user, which is still the vast majority of software.
Sometimes listening to technical people talk about software leave me feeling like the people who are meant to build the stuff are frequently the most out of touch with the needs of the users / customers.
Same for business but for different reason and in different ways.
That’s why there is a still a place for good UX designers and product managers to at least try and bring the gap, assuming they’re actually competent, which is hardly a sure thing.
Twey · · focus · HN ↗
I've seen this one a few times lately. People should stop building UIs, nobody wants to interact with a UI. Everyone's app should just be an API that you can use with a chatbot. Except for my app — my app is a handcrafted miracle of artisanal UX and its UI will change the way you see the world.
It's exactly the old argument, just now with LLMs in the place of shell pipelines: in terms of functionality and value to users, software ought to be malleable and composable. We've known it since the eighties. But the model of selling a piece of software as a product as if it were a pair of shoes is incompatible with that. You need a big monolithic application to justify users paying a bunch of money for it, and you need it to have a fancy interface that makes an impression. And the whole software industry is built on top of that model. Where monolithic software is completely unfit for a purpose, like when it needs to be a component of a larger system, we rely on (mostly unpaid) OSS.
Except now LLMs let you, with very little technical know-how, plaster a ‘programmable’ interface on top of unstructured data/interface meant for humans, and because that's what we actually want, of course everybody does that. So the end result is a wildly expensive pipeline from API to UI and back to API again. I wonder how long the legacy ‘human-oriented’ layer in the middle, and the industry that's been built on top of it, will last.
(Separately, chatbots are not great as a UI for most things, and the problem of building the universal UI still also stands. But it turns out for a lot of things people would rather have a bad universal UI than a good special-purpose UI for each task.)
jgalt212 · · focus · HN ↗
For technically competent users, sure. but for everyone else the UI should just follow the principal of least surprise.
Twey · · focus · HN ↗
perganomoly · · focus · HN ↗
I still Don‘t Make Me Think is the best guide for developing interfaces for non technical user, which is still the vast majority of software.
Sometimes listening to technical people talk about software leave me feeling like the people who are meant to build the stuff are frequently the most out of touch with the needs of the users / customers.
Same for business but for different reason and in different ways.
That’s why there is a still a place for good UX designers and product managers to at least try and bring the gap, assuming they’re actually competent, which is hardly a sure thing.