Everything is a Chat now

The other day I signed into Descript after realising I was still paying for it after a year of not using it.

But where I was once met with a dashboard where I could easily see all the projects I was working on…

There was now a chat interface.

Luke Wroblewski made the observation that this is the case for all UIs now, which was expanded on with an inspired quote tweet.

And whilst it seems inevitable. Like the final boss of software interface design…

Luke notes in his blog that there are still so many things the chat UI is not ideal at:

• Chat interfaces face the classic “invisible UI” problem: without clear affordances, people don’t know what they can do, nor how to get the best results from them.
• Walls of text are suboptimal to communicate and display complex information and relationships unlike images, tables, charts, ad more.
• Scrolling through conversation threads to find and extract relevant information is painful, especially as chat conversations run long.
• Context gets lost in back and forth interactions which slow everything down. Typing everything you want to do is cumbersome.
• Language is a terrible way to describe visual, spatial, and temporal things.
• Voice-based interfaces make it even harder to communicate information better suited to images and user interfaces.
• We’re very early in the evolution of AI-powered software and lots of different and useful interfaces for interacting with AI will emerge.