2016: The Future of User Experience
What’s happened with UX?
We’ve lived through a decade where great User Experiences (UX) and User Interfaces (UI) have defined high quality apps, websites, and consumer products. Apple has embraced the Flat UI standard while Google has championed Material Design. Facebook evolved across all platforms and developed one of the most beautiful messaging interfaces that 600 million people use. Airbnb was founded by design students who created a compelling vision and reinvented a marketplace using design thinking. These are just a few of the many companies that have validated that the way users touch, feel, and navigate through an app contributes to the success of the product.
Lennart Hennigs
Our idea of interfaces and how users experience products has become standardized. Buttons, swipes, continuous scrolling, layered cards, and other responsive methodologies are the norm now. Does this mean UX has reached it’s zenith? With minimalistic design being the preferred approach, can app experiences be streamlined any further?
Apps Building on UX- assistcornerstone
UX is continuously changing to the needs of each generation of users. This leads to the bigger question: Do we really need apps? When using apps, we take several steps to login, confirm our identity, punch countless buttons, and navigate through an array of text entry fields to get a desired result. At the end of the day, even the most beautiful UX breaks down to inputs and outputs. As a result, I believe we can replace apps with something more direct and easier to use.
It’s 2016! Why don’t we just ask for something to be done? A simple text message or a voice command is the input needed for any output we desire. How many Sci-Fi movies have we seen where talking to a computer makes things happen?
I don’t want to coin terms for the mere sake of reinventing design principles that may already exist. However, in the case of command driven actions, Interaction Experience or IX, is the natural progression of UX.
How do we define IX?
IX will ultimately be the way we get artificial intelligence to fulfill our requests in the most coherent manner possible. The world of apps would be replaced by AI assistants that understand, adapt, and engage with us. Just like how good UX is assessed by minimalistic design, good AI should be judged by how seamless it is to turn commands into tangible actions. Great IX is based on frictionless interactions, smarter context, and personalization. Let’s break each criteria down.
Frictionless Interactions
The margin of utility I get from giving a command or having a conversation with an AI assistant should be far greater than what it would take for me to download/open an app and do it myself. A harder task should not correlate to more user commands. If the AI keeps asking me for more details, I’ll just open up the app and do the task myself. An area where AI can be frictionless is when we have a set it and forget it mentality. If AI can complete recurring tasks for me, that provides convenience.
For example, I’d like to tell an AI assistant to Venmo my roommate money for rent on the last Friday of every month. This makes my life easier, I never have to forget, and my roommate doesn’t have to keep asking me. Here, the margin of utility is far greater when I have a recurring usecase. Whereas, if it was a one time payment, I might as well just open up the Venmo app.
techinfopluz
Smarter Context
AI needs to understand what I’m trying to say. I may have certain intentions that are hard to pick up from the literal words. Context is king. If AI can learn to adapt, it’ll save the user a lot more time and energy. I may be asking for one thing when I really mean something quite different. The AI assistant will probably get confused, stop, and breakdown? A common user concern is:
How can I trust the AI to do what I ask it to do? I don’t want to have to follow up every single time. I need the peace of mind to know that something has been taken care of.
AI that takes context and previous actions into consideration is a good starting point. Furthermore, AI assistants that can explain their reasoning, consistently follow up, and remind us when a task is done are not only diligent but also trustable.
Personalization
Taking context to the next level, I as a user want my AI assistant to understand my particular habits. Having context on past actions is great. What’s even better is if the AI assistant can predict what I will do and recommend what I should do. That’s where true intelligence comes in. For example, I could ask my AI assistant to tell me when I’ve reached my spending limit for the month. Great AI can go a step further and help diagnose where I am wasting money and suggest a plan to cut my weekly fast food expenses.
Why IX?
I see these three components of IX as the pillars that will define the next generation of user experiences. If AI really is the future we’ve all been waiting for, it needs to meet these standards to truly revolutionize our app based world. In 2016, IX is to AI as UX is to apps. Unfortunately, today’s AI assistants are unable to replicate the functionality of complex apps through simple human commands. This is a key problem waiting to be addressed.
We at Fireflies are launching our most ambitious project in 2016 to tackle just that. Fireflies is building Artificial Intelligence that will seamlessly complete tasks without people ever having to open another app again.
Our goal is to show that even small teams can build what is typically known to be extremely complex technology. It’s been a tremendous learning experience understanding the fundamentals of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Now, we get to apply it. Taking it a step further, we want to leverage the principles of IX to bring AI to everyday people for all of life’s scenarios.
Over the course of the next few months, we will be consistently rolling out features to Fireflies AI. The team will directly reach out to our user community for suggestions and feedback on what new features to build.
