I recently sat down with Mark Swaine on the UX Institute podcast to talk about where interfaces are heading, what's changing for designers, and why most of the software we use today is still kind of crappy. Here's some of the threads we pulled on.
You're Not a Hammer User
We don't call carpenters "hammer users." We call them carpenters. We focus on what they make. Yet the tech industry turned everyone into "users." The goal should be letting people accomplish what they came to do without forcing them to be conscious of operating a computer. That's been the north star for decades, and it's finally starting to feel possible.
Photoshop has thirty-plus years of interface built around manipulating pixels. But when you want to edit a photo, you're thinking "make her hair flow to the left," not "select these pixels and apply a transform." At Reve, we've been building around object-oriented editing, where you interact with semantic objects (a woman, hair, a vase) instead of drawing selection boxes. It matches how people actually think.
UI for AI
A developer I work with has this great framing for how people relate to AI agents. Some treat them like pets and some treat them like cattle. If you design for pet people, you show the full trace, every step expanded, every decision explained. But that creates walls of information that cattle people will never read. If you design for cattle people, you roll everything up into a clean result. But pet people feel blind and anxious. Depending on which group you're hearing from, you may up end up with very different UI.
Across every AI product I've worked on, three challenges keep showing up. Capability awareness: what can this thing actually do? Context awareness: what is it paying attention to right now? And walls of text: reasoning traces, tool calls, all streaming at you. We're making progress, but some of these may never fully go away.
Everyone talks about using a company's data with AI agents. The problem is most of that data is stale. Your CRM gets touched when someone remembers to. The real source of truth is the sales call happening right now, the Slack conversation from this morning. Code is a rare exception because the codebase is actually current. Almost nothing else is.
Jump In or..
I've lived through the birth and growth of the Web and mobile. Designers who aren't adapting to the new reality of AI are going to feel the ground shift even more than in those earlier tech transitions. You have capabilities right now that didn't exist a year ago. Go make things.
Listen to the full conversation on the UX Institute podcast.