> 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 chat is a great entry point for many experiences. The approachability and flexibility are unmatched.
A question becomes, how do you evolve a chat experience to task specific actions?
I’m building an app to explore scripture. Chat is an amazing starting point. But it’s terrible once you get into reading the actual scripture.
I think we will see more of this in the future. Here is how I’ve envisioned evolving an experience out of chat. Curious if others have their own ideas.
"I think chat is a great entry point for many experiences. The approachability and flexibility are unmatched."
Just wait a few months/years and then some smartasses will come with a novel approach nobody ever has thought of before. Let's call it "context menus". They will give rapid access to the most used features without the tedious typing.
Until MacOS 27 the text context menus had items "Writing Tools" and "Proofread". Quick and efficient. MacOS has dropped these items and replaced with "Ask Siri". Now I have to type "proofread" every time and pray Siri agrees that it should proofread the selected text. Once it has done that, do i have to type "replace"? I don't even know.
There is a reason why UIs became popular. Command lines are fine but hard to discover and tedious to use. With AI it's even worse. You can't know for sure the AI interprets your commands in the way you intended.
this whole shove chatbots into everything trend will get reversed or watered-down after a couple years like all the other trends
most of the time, a bad (or non-existent) ui is responsible for even a need of a chatbot; its lazy (and i say this a someone who was forced to implement a chatbot!) from a product design perspective.
that being said, could some complex apps benefit from adding both a command-line style interface to 'pop open the hood' so-to-speak for advanced users and provide a chat interface for beginners as well? yea why not?
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.)
jmathai · · focus · HN ↗
A question becomes, how do you evolve a chat experience to task specific actions?
I’m building an app to explore scripture. Chat is an amazing starting point. But it’s terrible once you get into reading the actual scripture.
I think we will see more of this in the future. Here is how I’ve envisioned evolving an experience out of chat. Curious if others have their own ideas.
<a href="https://trysojourn.app" rel="nofollow">https://trysojourn.app
vjvjvjvjghv · · focus · HN ↗
Just wait a few months/years and then some smartasses will come with a novel approach nobody ever has thought of before. Let's call it "context menus". They will give rapid access to the most used features without the tedious typing.
Until MacOS 27 the text context menus had items "Writing Tools" and "Proofread". Quick and efficient. MacOS has dropped these items and replaced with "Ask Siri". Now I have to type "proofread" every time and pray Siri agrees that it should proofread the selected text. Once it has done that, do i have to type "replace"? I don't even know.
There is a reason why UIs became popular. Command lines are fine but hard to discover and tedious to use. With AI it's even worse. You can't know for sure the AI interprets your commands in the way you intended.
andrekandre · · focus · HN ↗
most of the time, a bad (or non-existent) ui is responsible for even a need of a chatbot; its lazy (and i say this a someone who was forced to implement a chatbot!) from a product design perspective.
that being said, could some complex apps benefit from adding both a command-line style interface to 'pop open the hood' so-to-speak for advanced users and provide a chat interface for beginners as well? yea why not?