The advent of AI chat bots has positioned ‘chat’ front-and-centre as the future of UX - the nexus of all conversations, all interactions. And they portend to have personality; they’re friendly and converse with you in your own colloquialisms.
Coincidentally, “Chat Box” experiences are popular amongst software engineers. This is because they don’t need to build intuitive, usable, UI. It can be abdicated the LLM under cover of ‘articulate it in words’ and when it doesn't work ‘you’re dumb if you can’t write words’ because you used terms, language, and phrasing that doesn’t steer the magic text box in the way the user hoped. Developers build their beautiful cathedral of magic behind that veil, and avoid having to consider how easy or difficult it is to use.
This is similar to what I hate about calling a support centre — opaque processes & systems that have no clear path through them, and where I am left to coerce someone to perform an action on my behalf that should be a trivial click or tap. Instead I’m left with tools that try to be unnecessarily familiar & friendly. The call center, and most certainly not the LLM, aren’t actually happy to help me resolve my billing issue, or change the time of my appointment.
Is this a sign I’m old, and will forever be behind the future? Probably.
Have we abdicated the ability to just do something with pleading a magic number machine to do it for us?
Also probably.