The Post-Design Era: Interfaces for the Next Decade

The world of digital products is changing fundamentally. For the last two decades, we’ve been creating digital products for the masses, and we’re just beginning to make these products for each individual person. We’ve seen advances in “personalization” before. Smart feeds personalize content for users to ensure the most engaging and important information comes first. With the exponential growth in our computing capabilities and as transformer networks evolve, the new form of “person-centric” products will fundamentally act and feel different—enough to call it an entirely new category — post design. 

In an era of post design systems—intelligent interfaces will be context-aware and adaptable, breaking free from the confines of static buttons and text. A travel website, for instance, would no longer present a standard list of flights with airline names, logos, times, prices, and booking buttons. Instead, your query, "My grandma is in the hospital. Find me a flight ticket to B immediately," would trigger a tailored response. The interface would consider your immediate logistical needs, stress levels, time of day, and personal travel as preferences. The screen might adapt to your emotional state, displaying only essential information in soothing colors to ease your distress while considering nearby traffic conditions, packing time, and meal status to show flights the user can realistically board. 

Similarly, when planning a leisure trip, you would no longer need to navigate multiple sites and interact with various UIs to check listings, prices, availability, and location. The system would analyze your past booking history and preferences to customize the search interface. Instead of a standard list, it might display options in a dynamic visual graph, sorting properties by user-specific criteria such as proximity to attractions, based on your previous selections and helpful reviews. This graph would adjust in real-time as you refine your preferences, highlighting the best-reviewed or most cost-effective options in your desired area.

This is in fact exactly what Adept AI recently demoed. The qualities of these systems—context awareness and degrees of abstraction—will prove to be our best assets when building products and systems in the post design world. 

Soon enough, products that don’t shape-shift and adjust their visual interface will start to feel ‘dumb’ and unresponsive. Traditional UI design, as it stands today, often takes a one-size-fits-all approach, creating singular experiences meant to cater to the masses. In an attempt to design for a wide audience, designers rely on personas, pain points, and user classifications to guide their decisions. While this approach has been the standard for years, it leads to the creation of averaged-out experiences. By designing for the 90th percentile, designers are forced to make compromises that result in experiences that are not truly optimized for any individual user. This leads to a watered-down, generic feel that fails to fully resonate with users on a personal level. Moreover, the process of creating personas and classifying users itself assumes that such neat categorization is possible and that requirements and preferences are static. In reality, people are complex, and our requirements change based on time, mood, and all other messy variables of life. 

Traditional design methods struggle to accommodate this fluidity. To compensate for this lack of personalization, products often resort to artificially injecting a sense of warmth through carefully timed "delight" experiences. Such moments, like a celebratory animation after completing a task or a poorly timed notification, are meant to create a positive emotional connection with the user. However, it often feels shallow and a poor excuse in the name of personalization. I’m sure these flaws in the design process have been known to any practitioner, but we’ve lacked the resources required to overcome them. 

UI design has traditionally followed the visual design principles of emphasis, attention, and contrast. But with the ability to control these variables in real-time, we will soon be able to render screens that are intuitive and function, as well as the designs we are used to seeing today. 

Visual design and digital design heavily rely on predictability to create user experiences that feel familiar, comfortable, and easy to navigate. Over the years, designers have established a set of best practices and conventions that guide the creation of interfaces, ensuring that users can quickly understand and interact with digital products. These conventions play on our intuition by leveraging familiar patterns and visual cues. For example, a large, prominently placed button with a contrasting color immediately draws your attention and suggests that it is an important action to take. Similarly, the placement of navigation menus, search bars, and other common interface elements follows a predictable pattern, allowing users to find what they need without consciously thinking about it. This reliance on intuition and predictability has led to a certain level of homogeneity in digital design. Many products, whether they are websites or mobile apps, share similar layouts, color schemes, and interaction patterns. The fact that UI kits exist says enough about the state of the field. While this consistency can make products easier to use, it also suggests that the field of visual and digital design is ripe for automation.

As artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies advance along with increasing widespread use of wearable technologies, it becomes feasible to automate the creation of user interfaces—and adapt them on the fly. Adapting user interfaces implies that we are breaking free from the order that they were set in by their authors/ designers. The power of post design systems lies in their ability to form new order and create meaning on the fly. This allows us to manipulate data in a way that seamlessly fits user needs and contexts. A time where you break free from the order of these buttons and text, resulting in an adaptive interface.

With supreme context awareness, adaptive products, the post design world renders most conventional design practices useless. It pushes the traditional out and invites us to create new rules of the game. An incredibly exciting time indeed, where a newer, truer form of design evolves through this revolution—one that is not about efficiency, but about forging a deeper emotional connection with the user.

This coalition might also lead us to newer forms of visual language—one that is not limited to one medium at a time. We might start seeing interfaces that incorporate the use of sound, haptics and even environment to communicate with us. Adaptive products allow for a better, more equitable future where interfaces can  communicate with you in sign language, through audio, through real world anchors. 

Of course, the transition to a post-design world won't be without its challenges. Designers and builders will need to strike the right balance between personalisation and serendipity, ensuring that people are still exposed to new and unexpected experiences. They'll also need to consider the ethical implications of AI-driven personalisation, such as the potentially reinforcing biases or creating echo chambers.

In the post design world, we will create digital experiences that are more intuitive, engaging, and efficient than ever before—experiences and interactions that are so integrated into our individual patterns of behavior and thought that they become invisible. We might be on the brink of moving from designing for users to users designing their experiences, seamlessly and unconsciously. It's a call to embrace the messiness of human experience, to design not for an idealized user but for the real, flawed, unpredictable humans that we are.