➕ The Conditions 173
Rabbit R1 AI assistant, 58 rules for beautiful UI design, The New Digital Dark Age, How Not to Be Stupid About AI...
+Issue 173
Product Design & UX
The Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered gadget that can use your apps for you
Having watched the full keynote presentation, I feel much the same way about the Rabbit R1 as I did about the Humane Pin demo. It feels incredibly cumbersome. I think the issue with voice assistants previously wasn't necessarily that they gave bad/no responses (although that was a problem), it's that a speech/audio interface is incredibly inefficient. The user needs to prepare exactly that they want to ask in advance (that's not really how we think/speak) and waiting for results to be spoken back is also far slower than glancing through text. While text is easily scannable and video is scrubbable, audio is not, it’s time consuming.
So far, these AI assistants hinge on the results they deliver being absolutely perfectly targeted, given they only return one result at a time. I don't think we're there yet. The example of confirming a complex trip booking a single audio prompt is unrealistic, users require many options and customisations for something complex like travel booking.
I’d currently be far quicker and more accurate in my intentions and results if you gave me a web browser and multiple tabs.
Single result situations also deprive the user of the joy of browsing, hunting, serendipity etc. The Rabbit presentation seems to frame the user problem on the inefficiency of smartphones, however I'm not sure more efficiency is the answer. We see a lot of products dreamt up by silicon valley execs solving for exclusively ‘silicon valley exec problems’. I think the more important user problems to solve with AI assistants are things like: how a user may determine if they are satisfied with the results/options given or how they may filter and control further options and amendments to their query. I think users will still want to feel some level of ownership/autonomy for their choices. At least for now.
58 rules for beautiful UI design
The right UI can elevate an application from functional to unforgettable, making the difference between a user who engages once and one who returns time and again.
Speculative Calendar Events by Maggie Appleton
Designing tentative calendar events to solve complex scheduling problems
Call for a global design system by Brad Frost
TL;DR: This is a call to action to create a Global Design System that provides the world’s web designers & developers a library of common UI components. A Global Design System would improve the quality and accessibility of the world’s web experiences, save the world’s web designers and developers millions of hours, and make better use of our collective human potential.
Digital Trust
The New Digital Dark Age
Online trust will reach an all-time low thanks to unchecked disinformation, AI-generated content, and social platforms pulling up their data drawbridges.
Courts are slowly chipping away at a law the internet was built on
A novel workaround to tech companies’ favorite legal shield is racking up wins in the lower courts.
The end of anonymity online in China
Chinese social platforms have already expanded the scope of a controversial rule that requires influential users to disclose their legal names. Regular users are right to be worried.
AI & Machine Learning
How Not to Be Stupid About AI, With Yann LeCun
It’ll take over the world. It won’t subjugate humans. For Meta’s chief AI scientist, both things are true.
Design
Seven visual trends and how they’ll unfold in 2024
From the rise of childlike, crayon-covered graphics to swirly script and big, lumbering paint strokes.
Branding
Herman Miller’s history with Helvetica resurfaces in modernist rebrand
A new wordmark is among the changes brought in by Order Design; the sacred ‘M’ logo by Irving Harper has remained “off-limits”.