A key idea in product design is to make things easier and simpler as much as possible so people are faster at whatever they are doing, with the assumption that more efficiency generally means more satisfaction too. But even in business software (where we can fairly consistently presume, people want as much efficiency as possible) this is not always true.
Alberto Romero writes in Don’t Innovate My Hurdles Away:
That’s the utopian future Noah dreams of. A life that’s easier and better thanks to the gifts of technology. Including AI. The real trade-off, he argues, is that such a life would be inevitably shallower.
His essay leaves no doubt on this point: It’s worthwhile anyway.
But for me, it’s hard to grapple with the implications. A shallow world without adversity or struggle implies no fighting, no growth, no pride, no beauty—a truly hollow world, unable to be, as Dave feared, the source of great art: Is AI good because it makes the process easier or bad because it makes the world shallower?
Obviously, product design is not art, and shallow is often quite enough. But shallow rarely brings satisfaction, it’s just the fast food version of doing things. So what’s the balance we strive to achieve between efficiency and satisfaction? And: if all we can design are ever shallower interactions, maybe we should just automate those away, and leave a small piece of rich interaction that leads to higher satisfaction.
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