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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

This is a pretty awful take.

- AI surely has a place in design tooling, but designing UIs from the ground-up without human intervention would require a deep understanding of both human psychology and the domain at hand, which I really think would require artificial general intelligence.

- We're still leagues away from AGI.

- Is the author suggesting that UIs will restructure themselves in real time under subconscious feedback from the user? There is nothing that makes a UI more anxiety-inducing than unpredictability and inconsistency. The idea of a UI that's constantly in flux by design is, in a word, hilarious.

- That Autodesk feature doesn't even have anything to do with AI, from what I can tell. It's just a fancy constraint solver.

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Your third point doesn't seem that hilarious to me. What is wrong with a UI that is constantly trying to predict what is best for you? It doesn't necessarily mean that the flux will be chaotic or unwanted. I can imagine a UI which changes slightly based on how difficult it is for me to find what I am looking for. Not one which changes so often that it is it's own problem, but one which changes often enough to reduce some of the pain points in my workflows.

The problem is when it changes in ways that are unpredictable. All UIs change in certain ways as we interact with them, but users are constantly trying to create their own internal model of the interface's behavior so they know how to do different tasks repeatedly. We learn rules about how dropdown menus work, for example, or which nav links go to which screens (and how to get to other screens from there).

It's problematic when that underlying model is too obscured (not communicated well enough) through visual cues. It would be actively consternating to constantly shift it underneath someone who's trying to wrap their head around it.

Automatically changing interfaces are terrible.

Static menus are faster that magically changing menus. People want to know where to click to do a thing.

User customizable menus can be faster (when used well) than static menus.

Here's a study: http://user.ceng.metu.edu.tr/~tcan/se705/Schedule/assignment...

IMO, you'd get more mileage out of a menu with "Frequently used commands" that you can lock items into than with an AI rearranging stuff. And the algorithm is much simpler.

The hard part in UI is discoverability not repeatability. We would be wise to develop an easy to use workflow for finding commands based on what the user wants to do. Natural language processing could help here. Find a command: user types "How do I draw a box around some text". The search results should show where to find each command in nested menus, and be able to play an animated workflow example. An AI solution could help a user sift through a result set and find the choice that best matches their needs (for the box example, one way to add a box would be to turn on a border for a given paragraph, another way to get a box would be to add a free-form vector rectangle, positioned on the page).

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