Increasingly when I see designers defaulting to more Ul controls and form elements in software interface designs, I encourage them to consider the implications of intent-driven instructions. Here's why...
For years l've used this image of Adobe Illustrator's user interface evolution to highlight the continuous march of "more features, more Ul" that drives nearly every software company's releases. The end result for end users is more functions they don't know about and don't use. Not great.
So what's the alternative? Perhaps something like Christian Cantrell's Photoshop assistant demos. In this series of videos, Christian uses natural language instructions connected to Photoshop's APIs to do things like mask the subject of a series of photos, blur the background in images, create layers and more. All without needing to know how and without clicking a bunch of windows, icons, menus, and pointers (WIMP).
Intent-driven instructions to mask the subject of multiple images in Photoshop:
Intent-driven instructions to mask the blur the backgrounds of multiple images in Photoshop:
Intent-driven instructions to create layers and objects in Photoshop:
While these kinds of interactions won't immediately replace conventional graphical user interface controls, it's pretty clear they enable a new way of control software with hundreds of features... just tell it what you want to do.