What Is Generative UI?

> Users get personalized interfaces without custom code.

Personalized interfaces are bad. I don't want to configure anything, and I don't want anything automatically configured on my behalf. I want it to just work; that kind of design takes effort & there's no way around it.

Your UI should be clear and predictable. A chatbot should not be moving around the buttons. If I'm going to compare notes with my friend on how to use your software, all the buttons need to be in the same place. People hate UI redesigns for a reason: Once they've learned how to use your software, they don't want to re-learn. A product that constantly redesigns itself at the whims of an inscrutable chatbot which thinks it knows what you want is the worst of all possible products.

ALSO: Egregiously written article. I assume it's made by an LLM.

Yes and this is my biggest anxiety of future software and interfaces to come. You won't remember how you got there or did what because there are n permutations of getting there or doing that, except they're vaguely similar but not exactly the same thing. I too want predictable software (including UIs) that stays the same until I want to change/upgrade it myself as a user.

> I want it to just work; that kind of design takes effort & there's no way around it

Nothing "just works" for everyone. You are a product of your environment, people say apple interfaces/OSX are intuitive, I found them utterly unusable until I was forced to spend a lot of time to learn them.

Depending on which software you grew up using, you either find it intuitive or don't. If you found someone that has never used technology, no modern UI would be intuitive.

Personally, I hate it when software that I have to use daily is not configurable (and ideally extensible via programming). It's basically designed for the lowest common denominator for some group of users that product/design groups have decided is "intuitive".

> People hate UI redesigns for a reason...

I do agree here, stop changing things for the sake of changing things. When I owned some internal tools, I would go out of my way to not break user workflows. Even minor things, like tab-order, which I think most people don't think about, I'd have browser automation tests to make sure they remained consistent.

Ehhhh....

Is an AI driven feed not UI changes? Those are incredibly successful but the buttons change every refresh.

UIs do not need to be static. The key is that there is a coherent pattern to what's changing.

When you look at it through that lens it doesn't seem so exotic.

Yeah, additionally imagine supporting something like that: "Yeah, I cannot reproduce your issue because things on my end look different". A nightmare for sure.

CLI will always be there, don't worry.

I think you are right in the 'current paradigm' of what software is at the moment, where users are using a fixed set of functionality in the way that the developer intended, but there is a new breed of software where the functionality set can't be defined in an exhaustive way.

Take Claude Code - after I've described my requirement it gives me a customised UI that asks me to make choices specific to what I have asked it to build (usually a series of dropdown lists of 3-4 options). How would a static UI do that in a way that was as seamless?

The example used in the article is a bit more specific but fair - if you want to calculate the financial implications of a house purchase in the 'old software paradigm' you probably have to start by learning excel and building a spreadsheet (or using a dodgy online calculator someone else built, which doesn't match your use case). The spreadsheet the average user writes might be a little simplified - are we positive that they included stamp duty and got the compounding interest right? Wouldn't it be great if Excel could just give you a perfectly personalised calculator, with toggle switches, without users needing to learn =P(1+(k/m))^(mn) but while still clearly showing how everything is calculated? Maybe Excel doesn't need to be a tool which is scary - it can be something everyone can use to help make better decisions regardless of skill level.

So yes, if you think of software only doing what it has done in the past, Gen UI does not make sense. If you think of software doing things it has never done before we need to think of new interaction modes (because hopefully we can do something better than just a text chat interface?).

And not being able to have any usable bloody documentation!

Terrible article, poorly written by someone obviously fishing for clout

Cute, but your whole premise relies on knowing the right questions to ask, which you don't. We just had an entire decade of good interfaces being ruined by poorly conceived anemic "user stories" we don't need to further destroy our HCI for the next century or so

UIs definitely need to be static as people eventually build muscle memory

Consider Google's search results page (setting aside the ads and dark patterns for a moment) as a form of generative UI.

You enter a term, and depending on what you entered, you get a very different UI.

"best sled for toddler" -> search modifiers (wood, under $20, toboggan, etc.), search options, pictures of sleds for sale from different retailers, related products, and reviews.

"what's a toboggan" -> AI overview, Wikipedia summary, People Also Ask section, and a block of short videos on toboggans.

"directions to mt. trashmore" -> customized map of my current location to Mt. Trashmore (my local sledding hill)

Google has spent an immense amount of time and effort identifying the underlying intent behind all kinds of different searches and shows very different "UI" for each in a way makes a very fluid kind of sense to users.

I've heard from users they are burnt out on the UI many apps support. Buggy components everywhere across web, mobile, etc. e.g I can confirm that QuickBooks mobile app has so many bugs still in it for example and it's like 1/10th their web app.

I know personally I hit buggy forms and UI way more than I should preventing me from proceeding.

So I think there is an opportunity to instead have n permutations in natural language where the interface is consistent towards how the user inputs, it will just be up to the developers to support some UI for confirmation and structuring more complex input within chat itself. The biggest issue will be become discovery of what you can and cannot do without stationary UIs hinting at capabilities.

Anyways we are in new territory so it will be interesting how this plays out.i like to think of it as on demand UI but curious how others are toying with this paradigm.

We are testing a mostly display only interface for output where the majority of input comes in from chat and chat UI components right now just to see how this would work in practice.

I would argue the opposite - the premise actually accepts that software developers and product owners can't always know how their software will be used by end users.

Besides, HCI will inevitably change because after 30 years of incremental user interface refinement, your average person still struggles to use Excel or Photoshop, but those same users are asking ChatGPT to help them write formulas or asking Gemini to help edit their photos.

I don't accept the premise that the interfaces were ever actually that good - For simple apps users can get around them fine, but for anything moderately complex users have mostly struggled or need training IMO. Blender as an example is an amazing piece of software - but ask any user who has never used it before to draw and render a bird without refering to the documentation (they won't be able to). If we want users to be able to use software like blender without needing to formally train them then we need a totally different approach (which would be great, as I suspect artistic ability and the technical ability to use blender are not necessarily correlated that strongly).

The right questions aren't always known up front. Some of the reasoning for using AI in the first place is to refine a fuzzy idea, so a tool like this can help one to go from fuzzy to concrete, with good guardrails in place to ensure the concrete is truly solid. The in this case, the point is that the components of good user interfaces are already available, and then composed based on user prompts to their exact specifications and frozen for normal usage. Unfreeze and prompt again later to tweak further, etc.

The biggest issue will be that what you're describing will be 100x buggier than any currently existing application. If forms are buggy now, what makes you think that moving the buttons around non-deterministally would improve this?

I think the problem is having to "learn" software in the first place. You don't have to "learn" how to work with a good accountant or lawyer. They make it easy by exposing what they can offer precisely when you need it.

That's how I think software will work in the future. I'm not suggesting that the UI should be completely different on every render. Some predictability is essential. That's one reason I don't think codegen on every render is worthwhile. I'm simply suggesting that software should look different from user to user based on their individual needs.

I totally agree with this, and I'd go even further.

When I'm having trouble with software, I often turn to Google to figure out how to use it. I'm then directed to a YouTube video, help article, or blog post with instructions.

My take is that people are already accustomed to this question-and-answer model. They're just not used to finding it within the application itself.

Yeah, exactly. This is the progressive disclosure.

AI can give you a smart starting point (like a pre-filled formula) instead of making you start from scratch, and then you dig deeper only if you need to. That's what I mean by personalized software.

You get something that actually works right away, and you can tweak it from there. No need to watch YouTube tutorials or read docs just to figure out where to start.

Do you mean users or developers kowning the right questions up front?

Why do you need *external* documentation but for helping people to understand how software works?

These apps will need lots of documentation but instead of having to "search" for the section you need it would be just exposed as you need it.

"How do I do X?"

You do X by filling out this form: [FORM]

I'm not sure the problem here?

I agree this is a real problem.

We will need a new set of tools to help developers with this.

Just like a whole set of web analytics, logging, feedback tools were built when we moved to the web.

Before you could just gather feedback from your employee interactions, or by watching customers in your store.

I don't see this as categorically different, but the tools do not exist today.

Okay. They all suck. I want a list of websites that are likely to refer to my search query. Google is terrible at understanding my intent and even more terrible at displaying information in such a way as to facilitate my task.

As an example: I was searching for an item to purchase earlier. It's a very particular design; I already know that it's going to send me a bunch of slightly-wrong knockoffs. The first thing I want to see is all of the images that are labeled like my query, as many as possible at once, so that I can pick through them. Instead, it shows me the shopping UI, which fills the screen with pricing and other information for a bunch of things that I'm definitely not going to buy, because they're not what I'm looking for. Old Google would have had the images tab in a predictable place; I'd be on it without even thinking. Now? Yet another frustrating micro-experience with Nu-gle.

I understand the anxiety, but isn't this already the reality with most complex software?

Photoshop has thousands of possible panel arrangements, yet users develop their own workflows.

The question isn't whether permutations exist—it's whether the system helps you find your optimal permutation faster. Do you think the problem is unpredictability itself, or the lack of a predictable meta-pattern for how changes occur?

> but there is a new breed of software where the functionality set can't be defined in an exhaustive way.

Then fix your bugs so that the functionality set _can_ be defined in an exhaustive way.

It's not bugs that is the barrier here. Maybe functionality is the wrong word as I'm talking about something higher level than individual features, and maybe 'user stories' better represents what I'm getting at...

What I mean is that 'old' software has focussed on giving users lots of tools for users to complete their tasks, and when we talk about UI's we are talking about how to arrange all those tools in a way that is easy for a user to navigate. Users usually have to learn about all the tools that are there, so they know which ones to use (and over time the ones that learn about the existence of all the tools become 'power users').

But 'new' software might be more about completing users tasks for them, and these higher level tasks are the ones that are hard to define because there are so many permutations of what a user might want to do. As the software is helping users more, end-users might not ever need to know about the existence of all of the tools as they are abstracted away.