Ask HN: AI agents and the future of UI/UX design. Opinions?

11 pointsjackmenotti9mo ago9 comments

I'm a programmer, mostly working on UIs of any kind. Desktop, games, web, I did them all. One would call me a frontend developer although I think this title has been overloaded with negative sentiments lately(some deserved some not imo). Anyways I love making stuff render on any surface, I'm really passionate about anything UI/UX and I strongly believe doing good UI/UX in any context is very hard. Contrary to many developers I met over the years that love to hate UIs and underestimate the complexity of building a successful user experience, especially when you have to deal with multiple resolutions, performant graphics rendering, smooth animations, effects/shaders, accessibility, usability and many more.

Lately I've seen the rise of many interesting discussions around AI Agents, how they could shape the future of human interactions, making UIs obsolete and disrupting UI Design, or jeopardising companies that are gate keepers of their data/services through their own UI, if they won't adapt and develop an AI Agent integration they might be left behind, but the price of such integration might be big tech AI lock-in. That gave me a lot of food for thought, I'm not worried about my job, I actually am an enthusiast but also have some uncertainties. so I'm leaving here some points below and I'd really like to hear some opinions from this community.

  * A Chatbot or Agent is still a UI with some kind of UX but in a different form? I personally see Chatbots as "specialized" UIs like I think games are.

  * Chatbot responses do already embed rich widgets for improving the UX, and sometimes nothing better than a good old table exists for showing some structured data, so I don’t necessarily see UI components going away.

  * Then who would stop one to develop an agent integration on booking dot com that would produce a rich widget on my home screen with a summary of current offers or a price tracking chart?

  * And, even if it's all audio interactions we would still need to develop some "Audio UX" guidelines for making great audio experiences or not?

  * At some point in the long list of interactions, I feel like we may want to see and/or touch something, I mean we still are humans, and humans like physical things to touch, like pushing buttons.

  * Let's should not forget UIs may also exist as a fallback or for accessibility purposes, so I can’t see UIs going away, rather them becoming multimodal and adaptable maybe?

What are your thoughts?

9 comments

goodpanda9mo ago

I have been on this exact same quest and train of thought recently. I agree with almost everything you say about current UI elements sticking around. However, I do strongly feel that UI may be on the brink of a new revolution and we just don't know how it's gonna look and who's working on it.

Xerox Alto was the first GUI ever (ironically I chatgpted that in a text based interaction :D) and the leap from text to GUI was really not that obvious either I would think. I think we're in the text based computer era now and can't just know exactly where we will be in the next few years.

Now here's my crazy idea that will likely put me in a mental category: I think the ultimate "UI" will be intuition. It's not that I ask an AI to do something or fetch whatever I want. It's the act of just having constant access to all information and action subconsciously. Now for that you'd have to wait until Elon plants a chip in everyone or someone comes up with a less dystopian device :D

If you ever get to more clear answers to your questions please do share. Like I said I am very curious about this topic.

nthora9mo ago

I think the fundamental shift would be humans would do lesser and lesser of work that doesn't really involve any kind of human intuitiveness, domain expertise, critical reasoning etc.

Anything outside of these the movement is already begin where AI can do a lot of the simpler tasks with a reasonably high level of accuracy and incredibly high velocity.

For example writing blogs,

Now its possible to use AI to generate headlines and write a long form article at any velocity you choose to depending on the budget.

Now we will need an interface where a human can quickly review and adjust content to make it either accurate, authentic etc

All the CMS UI interfaces are optimized for writing and not editing. Thats where a new UI paradigm will have to be discovered to achieve that.

hollowturtle9mo ago

On the contrary side one could argue that most of what you describe is AI slop, and that human intuitiveness can't be replaced by a stocastic parrot trained on unique human intuitiveness, and that novel ideas and discoveries still are human exclusives, with ai that can augmented human power

wmolino9mo ago

I believe the best user experience will come from integrating generative AI, speech recognition, and AR/VR devices. These technologies combined could make interfaces far more intuitive and immersive — imagine interacting with data or services by just talking and seeing it appear in 3D space, instead of clicking through screens.

thornton9mo ago

that AI is trained on the old way of doing things. So AI can continue coding or can continue generating UIs that are all You know, Predictions based off of what the past was like. But then we’re at this weird inflection point too where you can’t really have just more of the same be the answer. Everyone kind of agrees that chat which is being used for pretty much everything right now, is nonoptimal user experience for most use cases. And yet that’s what we’re doing.

We don’t really know any better. Even agents that will take 15 minutes and then come back to you they’ll summarize a bunch of stuff along the way. That’s considered, like, good UX practices. That’s the best practice right now. Using using a small model to summarize a thinking models reasoning, as you go so that the user knows that while it’s waiting, things are actually happening.

So I think If anything, whatever is next becomes something new. And therefore it’s gonna be hard for AI in its current form, LLM driven m to solve for it. Without us doing some of that human computer interaction design thinking, for a long while.

aliasmaya9mo ago

I totally agree that most people underestimate the complexity of building a successful UX. I think the impact to the UI/UX was mainly in Vibe Coding, they can build a similar thing just by upload a picture, that save lots of time on me to tune the css! Although we cannot rely on it as it really a nightmare on building a maintainable code base product, but it do show me the PoC on how. Time is money, so the AI Era did help me a lot, cheers~

mmarian9mo ago

For most things, chatbots are terrible interfaces. You don't want to figure out what's the right question to ask, then wait for an answer. You just want to have the button you want pop in front of you, so you only have to click it.

maxcomperatore9mo ago

https://posthog.com/newsletter/vibe-designing

hollowturtle9mo ago

Slightly off topic? Or what just posting a link should imply?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

Ask HN: AI agents and the future of UI/UX design. Opinions?

11 pointsjackmenotti9mo ago9 comments

  * A Chatbot or Agent is still a UI with some kind of UX but in a different form? I personally see Chatbots as "specialized" UIs like I think games are.

  * Chatbot responses do already embed rich widgets for improving the UX, and sometimes nothing better than a good old table exists for showing some structured data, so I don’t necessarily see UI components going away.

  * Then who would stop one to develop an agent integration on booking dot com that would produce a rich widget on my home screen with a summary of current offers or a price tracking chart?

  * And, even if it's all audio interactions we would still need to develop some "Audio UX" guidelines for making great audio experiences or not?

  * At some point in the long list of interactions, I feel like we may want to see and/or touch something, I mean we still are humans, and humans like physical things to touch, like pushing buttons.

  * Let's should not forget UIs may also exist as a fallback or for accessibility purposes, so I can’t see UIs going away, rather them becoming multimodal and adaptable maybe?

What are your thoughts?

9 comments

goodpanda9mo ago

If you ever get to more clear answers to your questions please do share. Like I said I am very curious about this topic.

nthora9mo ago

I think the fundamental shift would be humans would do lesser and lesser of work that doesn't really involve any kind of human intuitiveness, domain expertise, critical reasoning etc.

Anything outside of these the movement is already begin where AI can do a lot of the simpler tasks with a reasonably high level of accuracy and incredibly high velocity.

For example writing blogs,

Now its possible to use AI to generate headlines and write a long form article at any velocity you choose to depending on the budget.

Now we will need an interface where a human can quickly review and adjust content to make it either accurate, authentic etc

All the CMS UI interfaces are optimized for writing and not editing. Thats where a new UI paradigm will have to be discovered to achieve that.

hollowturtle9mo ago

wmolino9mo ago

thornton9mo ago

aliasmaya9mo ago

mmarian9mo ago

maxcomperatore9mo ago

https://posthog.com/newsletter/vibe-designing

hollowturtle9mo ago

Slightly off topic? Or what just posting a link should imply?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse