User Experience

Star Trek: The quintessential computer of the future. Touchy, talky and, er, video-y.

But we shouldn't build entire paradigms, or even just individual interfaces, based on the assumption that everyone else is using computers the same way we ourselves do. Most people don't conceptualize graphic design ideas or freestyle pretend corporate presentations. Some are controlling an industrial process, editing a feature film, designing an a

The desktop user interface is a mainstay of computing. Bread and butter, if you will. A pointer, icons, windows, menus and buttons, controlled using a keyboard and a mouse. Ingenious simplicity.

For almost half a century now, we haven't really managed to come up with something better, and that's not for lack of trying. This fact seems to annoy a lot

To put the writing and speaking speeds into perspective, we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute . Natural language might be natural, but it’s a bottleneck.

That’s because text is not a mobile-native input mechanism. A physical keyboard can feel like a natural extension of your mind and body, but typing on a phone is always a little awkward – and it shows in data transfer speeds: Average typing speeds on mobile are just 36 words-per-minute, notably slower than the ~60 words-per-minute on desktop.

We keep telling ourselves that previous voice interfaces like Alexa or Siri didn’t succeed because the underlying AI wasn’t smart enough, but that’s only half of the story. The core problem was never the quality of the output function, but the inconvenience of the input function: A natural language prompt like “Hey Google, what’s the weather in San

This brings me to my core thesis: The inconvenience and inferior data transfer speeds of conversational interfaces make them an unlikely replacement for existing computing paradigms – but what if they complement them?