Does anyone still believe there is a long-term future in traditional UI/UX?
It feels like a lot of attention is still going into landing pages, dashboards, and CRUD apps, while overlooking a bigger shift where fewer people will actually need to interact with those interfaces directly when the same tools can perform the underlying tasks automatically, without much UI at all.
So the bigger question is does UI/UX evolve into something else, or does a large part of it simply disappear?
I might be a bit too early. Recently I started a project and decided to skip all of that and focus to make it more friendly to AI agents and frankly so far it has been great purely from user experience but also what it delivers.
How can it perform tasks automatically? It's not magic, there has to be an UI/UX for interacting with it. Will that UI/UX be more optimized and easier to use is the question. Like would you prefer saying "close window computer" or press alt+f4 or just click on the little cross thing or equivalent. Why are we assuming all AI automagic UI/UX will be better for all tasks?
AI agents can perfectly do a lot of the data entry tasks and build dashboards. You practically need to build none of that when you can ask an AI agent to pull the data and build a chart or provide a file or a paste to insert into a database.
Basically that.
If the app requires a mouse then it should have UI, if not, unless critical, it can be driven by an agent.
Is there a long term future in hand-crafted UI/UX? Maybe not.
Is there a future where we still have traditional UX? Absolutely.
I don't want to write a whole dissertation on this topic, so I'm just going to mention that we tried to build AI voice assistants for a decade, and while LLMs have basically solved understanding, they have not solved the UX portion.
Aside from entertainment/marketing purposes, I think UI will become useless. Why should I interact with UI when an agent can (and will) interact with it?
Because you do not know everything and information (possible inputs, actual outputs) still needs to be presented to you. Because text is not the best way to present everything. Because consistency of presentation makes it easier to absorb. Because everything is social and standardization is useful.
I hooked up our Hubspot to Claude and also found it very valuable, but I actually found the most value there in entity linking, data cleanup and general data processing more than the UI changes.
I still had Claude make me charts because I wanted to understand what was going on though.
I'm not routinely involved in sales, but if I was I feel like there are some breakdowns I would want to see regularly.
I also want to note that my startup sells an infra product. It doesn't need a UI, but people fucking love charts, so we built them the charts and they are happier.
On a slight tangent, since we are all here...
Does anyone still believe there is a long-term future in traditional UI/UX?
It feels like a lot of attention is still going into landing pages, dashboards, and CRUD apps, while overlooking a bigger shift where fewer people will actually need to interact with those interfaces directly when the same tools can perform the underlying tasks automatically, without much UI at all.
So the bigger question is does UI/UX evolve into something else, or does a large part of it simply disappear?
I might be a bit too early. Recently I started a project and decided to skip all of that and focus to make it more friendly to AI agents and frankly so far it has been great purely from user experience but also what it delivers.