Why you should think AI first
I’ll let you in on a secret: everyone talks about AI but very few have one. Shocking, I know. Here’s another secret: you should think AI first even if you dont have an AI! Otherwise you may find yourself exactly where I was a little while ago…
I’ve worked on a number of projects at Google, but the most famous one is probably the Chrome New Tab Page — the NTP. If you use Chrome you’ve seen it. It’s the page that pops in your face every time you launch your browser. At least until you replace it with an extension. Ahem.
What’s in there to “work on”, you ask? Good question. What should be a couple of lines of HTML turns out to be slightly more complex. Nowadays the NTP sports a fancy recommendation engine. Chrome is presenting you with eight thumbnails. Eight URLs it thinks you may want to navigate to.
It’s a feature that goes back to the first days of the browser, back in a time when no one dared call it a “recommendation engine”. Yet, even though things have changed under the hood, if you compare the current NTP to the original one they look fairly similar. In there lies the crux of the problem… A problem I bet many developers and designers will face in the near future.
Your AI in ball and chain
Turns out Google is pretty good at guessing what people like to do on the Internet. Are you watching Stranger Things on Netflix every night at 9PM? Did your coworker finally update that shared Google Doc you’re waiting on? Is there a centithread on reddit you absolutely have to chime on?
Beside being useful recommendations for the NTP, these examples all have something in common: they don’t work with the UI. Let’s see how:
- Thumbnails are hard to scan quickly. They work great if the list doesn’t change too often, but shuffling everything to add Stranger Things is the best way to confuse the user ;
- That Google Doc is only useful because your coworker edited it. If there is no way for the UI to convey that, there is no point adding it to the list ;
- If you start adding reddit posts, the list might quickly grow beyond 8 recommendations.
Every AI deserves a voice
The only thing I can predict about the AI in your product is that it will get brighter. Oh, you don’t have an AI? I bet you do! All these manual heuristics you coded are the seed of what may eventually become the brain of your software. If you don’t plan for it you’ll either miss opportunities or end up changing your UI more frequently than you should.
As it grows more and more clever, an AI becomes better and better at expressing itself. It can ask the right question at the right time or surface the relevant information when needed. This means your UI should be built with flexibility in mind. Forms with dozens of fields are a thing of the past, now it’s time to take the same route with the rest of your UI. Stop trying to coerce every bit of information into its specific little portion of the screen.
While your AI is growing a brain…
The thing with clever AIs is that they don’t exist. At first you’ll have a lot of “A” and very little “I”. If you’re not careful about it you may face the biblical flood of useless information that has plagued even the greatest — yes, I’m looking at you Google Now.
The key is to build a UI that is AI first but not AI only.
You should design a UI that works well even if your AI is only a set of hand crafted heuristics. It may sound impossible to do, but I’ve found the following guidelines help.
- Design good flexible units of information (FUIs).
Think Google Cards, but tailored to your product. Make them really flexible: a given unit should be able to display as little as an icon and as much as a complex array of data. - Arrange these FUIs in a layout that works.
Units should be free to take the size they need and not more. Lists are great, grids are awful. - Make FUIs expandable.
Each unit is a guess your AI is making. Sometimes it’s confident and wants to display a lot of information. Sometimes it’s taking a chance and should wait for a click before adding the details. - Think of your UI as a conversation with the user.
Imagine you’re offering information, then asking a question, then refining the information in return. If you’re into conversational UIs they’re perfect for the job. Simply add your FUIs to the conversation stream. If chatbots are not your thing, design interactive units that allow the user to guide the conversation and summon new information. - Sort, filter and fold aggressively.
Remember: your first AI will be dumb. It will be able to make one or two good recommendations but great guesses will be rare. Sort the FUIs, keep only a limited number to avoid information overload, and collapse your wilder guesses. - Have a universal fallback.
A dumb AI means that sometimes the information users really want will not be shown. Adding a navigation page, a More Recommendations link or a search box will help them get where they want to go.
Let a thousand flowers bloom
Now that you have an AI first product, it’s time to reap the benefits. The biggest advantage is that you can now try things: start building FUIs, arrange the information differently, tweak your heuristics. The idea is to always be running experiments. Remember:
No data, no AI!
So collect data! Track everything the users do. Let them easily give feedback on the FUIs they see. A/B test and roll-out your new units gradually. Keep what works and tune what doesn’t.
And once you have enough data, unleash the AI gods! Your app is ready for it, your users are ready for it… and so are you.
