Designing a user inteface involves thousands of small decisions. When trading off pros/cons for each of these decisions, in 99% of the cases, the right answer is ‘optimize familiarity.
That’s why Android and iOS look the same, and why the small differences between them are where contention happen.
If you adopt existing patterns, your users would be instantly familiar with your app, and the design will not get in their way.
HOWEVER, that familiarity is only a virtue because someone, once, deviated hard enough that their deviation became the new familiar. AI can only optimise toward the current snapshot of "familiar". It cannot produce the next one. If designers outsource all their thinking to a model even in tactful design we would never have groundbreaking design concepts like "pull to refresh" or the command palette.
That’s not necessarily what happened though. Apple innovated not out of sheer daring but because they also had the best metaphysical paradigm for GUIs that people could also just intuitively grasp. There was a structural correctness to their approach, underlying all the things that we find visually appealing. In the beginning, Google dared and deviated hard from Apple’s design language to establish their own unique identity, but anyone who’s working in the mobile space would Have noticed that Android coalesced into roughly the same patterns over time because of that structural correctness.
Which needs to be done intentionally in context, not homogeneously as a rapid output of a generative tool.
Jeez I hope fewer designers think like this (and if it's a traditional wisdom among designers, I hope fewer designers in general.) Perhaps web apps will stop moving their icons and buttons around every six months.
If you want to make a GUI, it should be familiar. Extremely familiar. It shouldn't invent new ways to interact most of the time.
It is well-known that "intuitive" in UX almost always means "what I'm used to". If you're regularly "innovating" in UI design, you may be making the product harder to use, maybe much harder to use.
It certainly isn't unheard of for new ways to interact with computers to be better than the old, but they are usually tied to new physical aspects of our tools: Touchscreens needed new ways to interact, and maybe there's still some room for creativity there, but not much. The mouse obviously required innovative ideas for several years. But, also, the odds of your wacky new idea being the right way to change how people interact with computers are pretty low, unless you're working at FAANG and have a UX research team and budget to test it.
You can get creative in how it looks, but you cannot get creative in how it works.
Innovation comes from the ways people differentiate, without straying too far from the tried-and-true patterns. It's the tiny decisions that situate UI elements and yes, reinvent the wheel sometimes, that can tip users over to whatever you're building because you did it better, or in a way "most" (the average) never thought of.
If people aren't creative in how it works, then really they're all just making the same, boring products, without truly competing against anyone in a meaningful way in the problem space. Visual appeal isn't a sole differentiator.
And no, it doesn't just add ARIA to everything as is so typical by poor practitioners.
I'm arguing about invention. It is extremely unlikely that AI will be the one to invent the next accessibility paradigm, because that requires deviating from the training distribution, which it CAN'T DO.
I'm also arguing that this homogeneity in design will lead to an atrophy in inventive, unique and original thinking.
What is it about our own architecture that lets us innovate beyond our training distribution?
"Good designers will reject this."
^ Famous last words.
I will very likely be wrong on the second point.
I guess that kind of thinking got us liquid glass - which everyone hates.
Except, ironically enough, enough people involved with both macOS and iOS at Apple didn't hate it enough — until it made it to launch.
Either there's a massive hierarchy issue there, or Apple is starting to suffer from groupthink that negatively affects a lot of their customers' experiences.
I have no idea how everything will play out, but this sounds a lot like the people saying "good programmers will reject this" six months ago.
Quite apart from anything else, it ignores the fact that—particularly within large organisations—designers (and programmers) frequently have very little say in the matter.
You’re talking about art, not design.
Not everyone is looking for unique design, 70% of the web is still using Wordpress. I would say majority prefer familiarity and appreciate uniqueness.
Most people using WordPress customise it with many of the thousands of plugins available though, and those plugins create menu items everywhere.
If you want to talk in absolutes, I'd say the best design is the one that results in the desired behaviour of your audience.
most of those "breakthroughs" were just constraint hacks. no room for a reload button. no room for another menu.
enterprise buyers don't pay for counterintuitive. they pay so the new hire finds save without training.
Until we have embodied AI's with eyes and hands that provide good enough approximations, the aspect of design bottlenecked on human experience will stay bottlenecked.
Overall after being laid off in January and a 17 year UX Research/Design/Dev career Im starting school in my early 50s to change careers.
I think more expressive UIs are the future but i disagree with this sort of thing being accomplished with a non deterministic tool such as AI generating UIs, you are throwing stability and consistency along with familiarity out the window.
The idea of tools being almost UI-less and composable and modular has been a "dream" since xerox parc or see for example the book "the humane interface" which happens to also ahead of its time outline reasons why such generative interfaces would be a bad idea especially at such a large scale.
AI can potentially relieve some friction with that paradigm but definitely not in that way or even that extent.
This is for non-designers to crank out slop with less effort. They can still be swayed by all the shiny knobs to feel in control.
Even the most deluded AI bulls don't say that AI is even meant to replace the best that humanity has to offer
While Great design breaks the mould, Very Good design is about surfacing the most expected outcomes for any action which reduces friction and lets people get work done. And this generation of Generative tools is very good at identifying the most common/most expected response to a prompt.