> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive

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.

If you want to be creative, you should make art. I love art. I think it's a great idea for people to make art.

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.

I noticed in your list that you didn't mention accessibility. I would personally rather have an accessible design than one which is "original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive." and here we are.

"An AI model is incapable of that."

"Good designers will reject this."

^ Famous last words.

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive.

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.

> Good designers will reject this...

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.

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive.

I guess that kind of thinking got us liquid glass - which everyone hates.

Data suggest different outcomes, there was always a way to standardise interfaces, from Twitter bootstrap, all the way to shadcn.

Not everyone is looking for unique design, 70% of the web is still using Wordpress. I would say majority prefer familiarity and appreciate uniqueness.

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive.

You’re talking about art, not design.

This is a great bridge between non-designers with taste and designers who can't fully technically implement their solutions (or want to more rapidly prototype their solutions). Well done AI implementation is like cosmetic surgery. The trashiest implementations you can tell immediately and the more tasteful ones are subtle

IMO AI will make plain the divergence between "good design" and what people actually want. You're absolutely right that from an artistic perspective, it will produce the heat death of UI. I just struggle to think if teams building will actually care. Boring but polished is completely fine for SaaS.

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive

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.

Plus: So much of excellent user interface design is done through iterating on feedback from live humans testing it with their human sensory system.

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.

> The best design is original, groundbreaking and often counterintuitive.

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.

Web design / digital design is a dying field as businesses will start paying one person who does 3 to 4 roles (PM, UX Research, Design and UI Development - tho why use a design tool for web stuff when AI tools generate designs in code), as well now tons of ppl can do this work using AI tools. Further, is the future of digital experiences user interfaces aka the web or will there be an AI Phone where everything is done / seen on the lock screen (AI generates the visuals as you text or talk to it) and or its more of a text and voice digital experience less UI.

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.

Why is everyone hell bent on AI replacing the "best" designers or writers or coders?

Even the most deluded AI bulls don't say that AI is even meant to replace the best that humanity has to offer

why would an AI model not capable of doing something unique? That's literally false.

You could have said the same thing about powerpoint vs high quality marketing departments. The "pros don't want this" argument doesn't really hold weight.

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.

I hate to hand anything to Generative AI tools, but

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.

[dead]