I’ve been helping my mum fill out various forms for a house purchase for the past week or so. All of the forms are sent to her as PDFs by the solicitors, which are not the easiest or most intuitive to fill in electronically when you’re not a digital native. My first instinct was to open them in Adobe Acrobat, which I feel like has been the go-to PDF viewer since forever. But my goodness, the UI is a mess. A bunch of mystifying toolbars compete with big, shiny, distracting AI buttons and popups, encouraging you to try this feature you didn’t know you needed. In comparison, Apple’s Preview felt like a breath of fresh air, with just enough UI features to get the job done. It’s pretty crazy how a design company like Adobe, for years an industry leader for design tools, has allowed UI and UX design to take a backseat when it comes to what must be one of its most widely used products.
It’s unfortunately reminiscent of what a lot of websites have become, especially on mobile. When the experience of clicking a link, waiting for a Javascript-heavy page to load and dismissing a thousand pop-ups has become the norm, it’s hardly surprising that a good many users would rather bypass that experience altogether and are turning to AI and chatbots to do the browsing for them. Reading a simple, clean, digestible page of text in answer to a question is by far easier than playing click roulette with Google. And many are willing to overlook, or even ignore the trade-offs: that the information you’re receiving might not be accurate, and that its use presents a whole lot of ethical issues. When we’ve failed users this badly, I can’t say I blame them.
One of the points brought up in a talk by Anne Currie at Green IO conference was the idea that it’s virtually impossible to talk users out of a product they clearly want (referring to generative AI). But why do users want these products, despite their failings? The experience of browsing the web could be so much better than it is right now, without the huge social and environmental cost of AI. Perhaps there would be less demand for chatbots if the web itself was less hostile.