Nearly a decade ago, Golden Krishna, a designer and product philosopher at Google, published The Best Interface Is No Interface. In it, he argued that everyone had fallen in love with screens and products as solutions to every problem.
There is an amazing example where he describes a BMW iPhone app that lets users unlock their car. It takes about 13 interactions to unlock the car—a task that a car key could do with one press.
I remember devouring the book in one sitting and thinking, “Yes, this guy gets it. We are obsessed with screens.” The challenge to designers is to fall back in love with people's problems, not the solutions.
It can be confronting for a designer to start with the assumption that maybe we don’t need “an app for this.”, but that is how we should be thinking.
On Wednesday night, I stopped by an AI demo night at Betaworks and watched six companies showcase their new products. This was the first time I realized that we might be getting close to the ‘no interface’ concept.
When your product’s interface isn’t tied to query a SQL database, a whole new world of possibilities opens up.
Chat interfaces are the first attempt, which makes sense. We’re already familiar with them, but there are trade-offs (what can I ask it?). This is a problem that all voice interfaces have suffered from for years.
The most impressive demo came from a company called Opponent, founded by artists and founder Ian Cheng.
The product lets you have a conversation with a 3D moving dragon. You ask it questions, and it answers. It’s designed for kids, takes feedback, and learns.
One impressive part was that there is no app. Nothing to download, install, or sign up for. It’s just a phone number that you can FaceTime. That is the interface.
This sparked a good conversation at our table, with John from Betaworks pointing out that a cup tells you what you can do with it partially by how it looks. This is different from a chat window. You know you can write in it, but what can you write?
That might be a bit abstract, but I think the underlying idea here is that when an AI can understand everything you say or type, how do we help people know what to do? And how do we ask them to do that?
A dragon on a FaceTime call is one answer and a very interesting one.
I wonder if we will see a range of ‘video call agent’ products this year.
Jumping up a couple of levels, it is possible that we are on the way to a no-interface (or at least less-interface) world, which would be good for everyone.
All eyes are on what Apple will announce on Monday at WWDC.