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by tgv 1998 days ago
One thing that strikes me is that these interfaces are incredibly specialized for the task at hand, and only that. You can't build for every task, you'd need a super-intelligent system that knows how to figure out what the task is and generate the appropriate UI for it.
3 comments
AnIdiotOnTheNet 1998 days ago
Alternatively, make the UI malleable enough that the user can conform it to their usecase. A lot of applications used to try and allow that sort of thing, but the trend for the past 15 years or so has sadly been exactly the opposite. Case in point: bespoke "dark mode" has replaced the near-complete control over colors and fonts we had in the 90s. Instead of customizable toolbars and re-arrangeable MDIs with sub windows everything is a fucking electron app with giant shiny buttons for mobile users regardless of the platform it runs on or even if mobile use is suited to the tool.
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vincnetas 1998 days ago
Yes, but if system is inteligent enough to know what is the task and why it needs to be performed, why do we even need an ui. Let the system do what is needed :)
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tgv 1998 days ago
Such systems always live in a Star Trek kind of universe, where they simply await orders from humans, yet know vastly more than them. It's probably about our sense of goal: machines help achieving a goal, but not set it. While I personally also like to have control, I'm sure there will always be a Musk or Kurzweil around to advocate machine autonomy, and they will implement it no matter what. That's why such interfaces are unrealistic.
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dfox 1998 days ago
For a long time that was my approach to LoB backoffice applications: make the backend clever enough that there is no need for non-trivial user interfaces (in the sense of being non-trivial to implement). That in part works well but on the other hand there are situations when the user knows more, uses the thing every day and thus making something something that looks like sci-fi UI (or like something straight out of mid-90's OS HIG, with the difference being mostly about color choice) makes sense.
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rmac 1998 days ago
This is why most b2b tools have boring interfaces: they don't know what the task is, so they generalize and build yet-another interface on-top of SQL. See splunk, looker, G Analytics, Stripe, Shopify, etc.

Is it possible to somehow let the end user design a ui/ux that works for them?

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