The UX of AI
Stop burning my Toast, SiriLexa!
There’s much talk about how AI will make it easier to design user interfaces (the screen of your iPhone) and human-machine interfaces (everything from your steering wheel to your toaster), so that we humans can better and more easily understand how to interact with all our devices. And there’s no question that it can speed up the process. But from what I’ve seen so far, the increased speed and volume of output have created more issues than solutions.
I have a few words of advice for the artificially intelligent. For one, humans do not like to learn new ways to do the same thing. Despite our taste for fashion, variety, and constant improvement, we are creatures of habit. So please stop changing the UI every five minutes and calling it ‘updating based on feedback.’ Got it?
In the meantime, you and your human handlers can help us with a more fundamental issue, one of the age-old problems of UX design: balancing interface design between showing too many buttons, gauges, and levers - and showing too few.
To elucidate.
Most humans want to know where things are. That may sound obvious, but alas, it is not. Using the toaster example, why can I not immediately find the button that pops the toast out when the toast starts to burn? Have I taken a stupid pill, or is that function hidden away in a “sensitivity dial”? Yes, I can learn that as a human, and the price is only one piece of burnt toast. But because I am a digital nomad who wanders from one AirB&B to another, I can end up with a lot of burnt toast.
And sometimes, just sometimes, the price is not burnt toast. It can be a lot higher. Imagine you are driving in your smart car. You have the AI drive set to ‘self-driving’ or something more legally palatable like ‘driver assist.’ You take your hands off the steering wheel to fiddle with the YouTube app on your iPhone, trying to figure out how to stop a video from playing and get back to the main screen (no back button and no prominent pause button). You slam into the car that was stopped for a red light in front of you because you had inadvertently canceled ‘driver assist’ when your hand crazed the non-haptic touch sensor on your steering wheel. At least the airbags worked, right?
So, what does AI need to learn about us humans?
1. Stop changing the fundamental stuff. Humans only like change when it’s cosmetic. Yes, you can change the colors and a few fonts from season to season. That’s allowed. I know this sounds complicated and fickle, but tell us it’s “new and improved,” but don’t actually change anything.
2. Understand the balance: Avoid interface clutter, but please, please, stop hiding the critical stuff. We don’t like burnt toast, and we don’t like t-boning other cars.
3. One more thing: we don’t like to read manuals.
One last rant. I find it weird to talk to inanimate objects. And I find it really weird when those inanimate objects - that are always listening to our conversations - suddenly, and completely unprompted, hallucinate and think I’m saying “blow up the house” when I actually said “Show up at the house.”
Yeah, it's probably just me.