Why No UI is the Best UI
UI = user interface. That means a thing that helps the user interface with… something. The term is often used in the context of software. So Salesforce has a UI for sales data, Facebook has a UI for social information, Tinder has a UI for dating…
But at the end of the day, a UI is an intermediate between a person and technology. And no intermediate is actually better than any intermediate, no? If I could just speak and say, “Show me all of the Salesforce records for $10MM deals and above.” and the information appeared, and never have to fiddle with a login, dropdown, and some sorting…that would be better no?
Speaking is natural. Typing on a keyboard, mousing around, etc. is not. The latter are intermediates for thought, speech, etc. Even speech and writing are arguably intermediates for thoughts, i.e. I have a thought and then I need to open Slack, navigate to the right channel, type it out, and post it (and then others have to be notified or just be in the channel, see it, read it, consume it, process it, etc.). Arguably it’s faster for me to shout across the table to the rest of my team — there’s no UI really unless you include mouths, language, voices, ears, etc. You could count those things if you wanted to — there’s a UI for communication whether the medium is speech/audio, text, visual, etc. Whether it’s speech, thought-to-machine, or some other medium, there are UIs far more efficient than our current mode of finger-screen, mouse-keyboard, etc. But hell, no one’s really trying to disrupt the keyboard (evolving the keyboard doesn’t count in this context, IMHO).
This of course relates to the conversation about ‘invisible apps’. People don’t care about UIs unless they HAVE to deal w/ them. Not enough people have thought outside of the box to say, “Forget making the UI intuitive. Why don’t we just skip the concept of a built up UI and just piggybank on an existing UI?” The existing UI may not be perfect, but no matter the flaws of a popular UI like SMS, it’s easier than learning a new UI. Your UI, no matter how good, is never better than none at all.
It of course also relates to things like Siri and Cortana. While they have been held back so far by imperfections like misunderstanding what a user says, in theory, the idea of speaking and having a machine handle the task without you having to use a UI is a no brainer.
Much like mobile, which for all its flaws originally like a small screen (hasn’t changed much despite minor enlargements) or limited App Stores (overcome), had so many underlying benefits (ubiquity) that the other things didn’t matter. “No UI” things — while limited in some ways in our current mode of thinking (settings might be super hard to adjust!)- will be better than things w/ fancy UIs because of efficiency. (Hell, you won’t NEED settings when things just work!) And more and more we just want the thing done, we don’t need a fancy UI and are not impressed by the novelty of colors, and menus, and all that stuff. We just want it done — UI or no UI.
I just wrote this because it’s been on my mind, not because I’m advancing some formal public discourse on the matter or care about article views.
