Generative AI is for going deep, not wide
Musings on the real power of generative AI as Adobe (and others) appear set to “go native”.
Last month, I shipped out to Las Vegas to attend this year’s Adobe Summit. A few of my colleagues handled more overarching recaps of the event. As for me, I’m stuck on one particular theme that clearly stands out. Naturally, that’s generative AI.
Groan. Eye roll. Stick with me.
Let’s start with this: Adobe, just like Microsoft, Google, and other tech giants, appears to be making great strides toward integrating generative AI capabilities directly in to its tools. This is kind of a duh revelation, but, in my estimation at least, it is the easier-said-than-done development needed to mainstream AI for, well, for people like myself.
Put another way, at this exact juncture, generative AI has almost no bearing on my day-to-day professional life. There are a few reasons for that, but the biggest is quite practical. To use ChatGPT or Midjourney, I have to leave Adobe Experience Manager, or Figma, or Microsoft Word, or whatever application I’m actually using at that moment, put in my prompt and cross my fingers. If all of that goes well, I have to save the image or copy and paste the text, and by the time I’ve round-tripped back to the tool I was actually using when all of this started, well, I haven’t really saved myself much, if any, time. And that’s not even broaching the topic of ethics or legality or brand safety as we weigh up generative AI’s utility in its current form.
Anyway, Adobe seems deadset on changing this calculus. Almost every session I attended featured some showcase of these tools going native in a way that goes well beyond Firefly finding its way in to a few more Creative Cloud applications. If you, like me, are tasked with managing brand consistency while also enabling dizzyingly voluminous scale, then Adobe’s introduction of Custom Models, which will allow Adobe’s AI to be trained on your brand, is the biggest deal of all. Not only will AI be native to Adobe’s tools, but it will also know me and my brand.
Not coincidentally, this is where this starts to get exciting on the day-to-day level. And that is because the real power of generative AI, as showcased over and over out in Vegas, is in the endless remixing of what you already have on hand - your logo and color palette and visual style and owned assets and so on.
Do the math. You don’t actually need very many raw materials to get to hundreds of thousands or even millions of combinations. In fact, you probably have the basic ingredients to get there right now. What you don’t have - at least not yet - is a machine to help you rapidly assemble and re-assemble all million of those combinations in a matter of minutes.
We humans are constrained by the laws of time and space. Not so for generative AI. It does some very strange things when given an almost blank canvas - its six-fingered men and casually told lies belying its lack of humanity. But when given some guardrails, its potential to do what those of us who are corporeally challenged can not seems likely to be cause for celebration. And, wonderfully, that capability does seem to be at our fingertips now.
Sure, generative AI still has a role to play in other parts of the creative process. It can certainly serve as a built-in riffing partner when you are ideating. But, at least to me, it’ll be a much more exciting though slightly less magical development when it can instead be handed a fully-formed idea and give it legs that stretch from social to email to website to out-of-home advertising and beyond.
In this context, it seems almost silly to worry about the machines taking jobs. What they’re really coming for is a job none of us has the time or spirit to do. We can go wide - maybe wider than ever before - coming up with a winning idea, safe in the knowledge that once we’ve stumbled upon just such a thing, the machines will be able to help us go deep.
If it’s a device, just wait for Apple
As the Vision Pro arrives, reminders abound of why Apple has such supremacy.
In just a few days, you or me or anyone can pre-order the new Vision Pro from Apple. By the time the Super Bowl is being played, people will be walking around wearing them.
Look, it seems to me that Apple is a different company under Tim Cook than it was under Steve Jobs. It is hegemonic, not an upstart. It’s not quite as groundbreaking. Even for a brand with premium pricing, the Vision Pro has an - ahem - eye-watering price tag ($3,500 compared to, say, $600-$700 for the Oculus). And the marketing for it leans on product features and appeals to authority that probably offends Jobs-ian purists.
As a final caveat, I’m not an expert in this stuff. I’m sure Apple has had some flops that I am forgetting, and I have always been skeptical of VR/AR headsets. People have been talking about this stuff for literally decades and it has not come to fruition in the way forecasted.
But if I had to guess, I would guess that we’re entering a new era of computing - yet another ushered in by Apple.
Late last year, I watched the film BlackBerry, which is great for a lot of reasons, most especially for giving us a bald Glenn Howerton doing a CEO version of Dennis from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The film climaxes with the announcement of an iPhone, which, of course, destroyed Research in Motion’s market share in quite short order. RIM made many mistakes on the road to oblivion, and, at least according to the film, arrogance was its biggest sin.
But, you know, this stuff is also hard. The first-mover’s advantage, if indeed it is an advantage at all, just buys you time. And Apple seems to put pressure on the market like no other - not just from a time-based perspective, but also in the seeming inevitability of it shifting the paradigm.
I’m reminded of this every time I have to turn on the television in my basement and am disappointed to see the Roku interface pop up. No touchpad. No easy connection to my AirPods. Might have to sign in to a streaming service I’ve signed in to scores of times already. Roku was a nice bit of technology when it first arrived, but as usual Apple did the trick of making it simultaneously less conspicuous in my life and also more integral. It won’t surprise me if the Vision Pro turns out the same way.
What it really means to “delight”
Delight is one of the most overused words in experience design. Besides using it less, we should also use it with more intention and clarity for what it really means.
"トイレの的 a target on male toilets" by Yuya Tamai is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Of all the tired UX tropes, few are more somnambulant in this, the year of our lord 2024, than the notion of “occasionally surprising and delighting end users.”
It’s not that this sentiment isn’t something to which we should aspire. It’s that it is so often presented as some sort of design answer to Thomas Jefferson’s clause about the “pursuit of happiness.” Here is the highest plane of the discipline - some sort of nirvana ascended to after you do the right amount of user research and eat your Wheaties.
To me at least, this is all a matter of orientation within the design community. We throw that “delight” word around far too much. Aaron Walter’s pyramid of user needs isn’t wrong. But when we view pleasure and delight as something we are move toward as opposed to something we strive for in the rarer moments, we rob attention from how important and how hard it is to make something functional, reliable, and usable.
So, yeah, if you’re asking my opinion, I’d like to hear a lot less of that word over the next decade or so than I have over the last. And I’d also like for us to remember what it really means and what its place is in the design profession.
Just before the end of last year, I read Naohiro Matsumura’s book Shikake: The Japanese Art of Shaping Behavior Through Design. Matsumura is an academic, and in quite academic fashion, he proposes a whole new field of research (“Shikakeology”) around designs that uses innate behavioral triggers to nudge people toward positive change. This is in opposition to, well, however else we might do it currently, whether that be scare tactics, shaming, or direct appeals to our better nature.
Matsumura might well be on his way to a new field of study, but as I thumbed through his many, meticulous examples of “shikake,” I kept coming back to that word delight. The thing Matsumura recognizes, and illustrates so well, is how subconscious and, yes, often fleeting delight is.
We, us users, don’t always need delight. Often, we want to pay the bills or book a table at a restaurant and just be done with it as quickly as possible. The delight comes when we don’t have to do anything your app or website. Even when that’s not the case - when we might just go for a little bit of it - we sure as shit don’t want to be aware of it as it is happening. At the very best, we might look back and marvel or just appreciate it after the fact.
Delight in the field of experience design isn’t like it is at, say, the cinema. You aren’t there to know you’re having a good time. The good time and the good thing may never even feel connected.
One of Matsumura’s most memorable examples of “shikake” are tiny bullseyes placed in mens’ urinals. Here is a delightful experience (trust me on this one, ladies) with no obvious connection whatsoever to its good outcome: vastly cleaner public restrooms.
Indeed, what’s so striking to me about this example of “delight” is how disposable it is. People take aim for a minute. Then they walk away, wash their hands and leave. The cumulative effect is that fewer resources are needed at less frequent intervals to take care of a bathroom. A bunch of highly disposable “delights” add up to something quite durable: a more functional, reliable, and usable bathroom.
The pyramid of user needs isn’t something for us to scale. It’s a North Star for proportion and emphasis.
When do you know you’ve built a successful design system?
The bliss of hearing someone tell you “we usually get much less than this.”
Much ink has been spilled and countless conversations have been had about what is needed to make a design system successful - indeed about what a design system even is, definitionally.
I don’t have much to add to the discourse there, other than to say I am firmly in the camp that is more of a mindset and a culture than it is a UI kit. An Australian colleague of mine likes to characterize it as a record of design decisions. He’s a much better authority on the topic than I am, but having worked on one for the better part of a year, I find this to be a perfect summary.
Anyway, if I don’t have much to add to this ever-swirling debate, I do have something to say about how you might know when you’ve finally been successful in doing what you’ve set out to do.
“This is much more than we usually get.”
Hear that phrase, as my team did this week from a developer, and it’s a good bet you’ve built something pretty good, especially if what you’re handing off is something that’s already in use somewhere else, and you’ve done little or no work to hand it off.
It was a hugely gratifying moment, of course, to hear that sort of thing after months and months of exhaustive work.
But it was also quite the reminder. Digital design systems have been around for a decade or more now, but to people outside of the experience field - even a software developer at a huge agency - they can still feel new and powerful and even a bit revolutionary.