The Bleakness of Chat Interfaces
If the future of user interfaces is text fields and chat bubbles, it’s probably a future I don’t wanna participate in shaping. But then of course it’s not.
“Is (blank) the future?” could be the one question you need to summarize 2023 so far, and you would probably have ChatGPT to thank. If the future of user interfaces is text fields and blue (or green – gasp!) chat bubbles, it’s probably a future I don’t wanna participate in shaping. But then of course it’s not.
The new CLI
Chat-based interfaces are the CLI of 2023. They are easy to develop, so we can’t blame people for developing them. If you’re a person or a company focusing on some new technology that does a good job at responding to prompts, and want to let the general public play with it without too much engineering overhead, it’s the most sensible choice.
There’s also something humanizing about chat-based UI. We’re used to chatting with other humans, which is associated with and evokes our emotional response. Staring at a screen with a chat on it has conditioned us to feel things. Overall, great choice of a UI model if you want your creation to appear more human.
Next steps
Despite how well this UI works for the new and emerging applications, I’d like to think of the chat-based UI as the MVP – the thin layer of abstraction necessary to allow meaningful interactions between the algorithm and the users. As people start thinking about the new interactions these technologies enable and the meaning of those interactions, new abstractions are very likely to emerge.
Maybe this is all just wishful thinking, but I think we can ultimately do better than chat experiences. That is, if we want to apply these shiny new technologies more widely – and it seems like we do. It’s hard to imagine moving away from meticulously crafted icons, buttons, and visual effects, in favor of boring text fields on a contrasting background.
This post was originally published on May 3, 2023.