While chat is powerful, for most products chatting with the underlying LLM should be more of a debug interface – a fallback mode – and not the primary UX.
My favorite example of truly effortless communication is a memory I have of my grandparents. At the breakfast table, my grandmother never had to ask for the butter – my grandfather always seemed to pass it to her automatically, because after 50+ years of marriage he just sensed that she was about to ask for it. It was like they were communicating telepathically.
*That* is the type of relationship I want to have with my computer!
Programming is this weird discipline where sometimes the next five minutes, not always, but sometimes the next five minutes of what you’re going to do is actually predictable from the stuff you’ve done recently.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth for design teams: We’ve built interfaces that require users to learn our system, instead of systems that adapt to users’ mental models. It’s the cardinal sin of UX design, and we’re all guilty.
We’ll need to shift from designing interfaces to designing outcomes.
In a traditional interface, the path forward is predetermined by the designer. In a chat interface, the path can feel completely unstructured.