Navigating the Web with Text vs. GUI Browsers: AI UX Is 1992 All Over Again

Solution: reuse the proven GUI techniques for the new outcome specifications. A hybrid user interface that controls AI interactions through traditional graphical UI techniques. GUI has superior UX qualities that AI will need for broad market success:

• Visualizing available actions, guiding the user at each step according to the usability heuristic of recognition rather than recall.
• Point-and-click interactions, rather than spelling and assembling words, which most people find challenging.
• Direct manipulation: Allowing value adjustments through intuitive means, such as sliders.
• Error reduction due to these direct manipulation and click-based interactions. I can’t tell you how many times I have made errors in using Midjourney due to typos or forgetting the correct number of dashes or colons in a prompt specification. (Remember that our UX ideology considers user errors the designer’s fault for creating an error-prone user interface.)
• Prettier. In fact, much higher aesthetic appeal than the ugly UI sported by current AI tools. (I bet you would never have expected me to highlight good visual design since I was famous for distaining big graphics during the dial-up era of the web, but that was because of response time limits, not because I don’t realize that good-looking designs perform better with users.)
• Consistency with the interaction styles of non-AI tools, such as web browsing and application use.