Make phones smart again
The future of design is multimodal.
I drove into NYC last weekend to get some gelato. I had to pay for street parking. So I opened up the ParkNYC app, entered the zone number from the parking sign, then selected how long I wanted to park, and hit pay.
It seems simple, but the parking sign was hard to see in the dark. I was trying to not get run over in the bike lane as I went closer to the sign. It was freezing outside. I had to add my new license plate in the app. I had to figure out how long we’d be out eating gelato. And in the middle of all of this there was a pop-up asking me to rate the app.
My phone has sufficient inputs to understand my situation. It can read the number on the parking sign, it has GPS to know where I parked, and it can hear my voice. It knows which car I’m driving because my phone is connected to it. It also knows that I’m grabbing gelato because my phone guided me here. I should be able to simply tell my phone:
”Hey, I need to park here for about half an hour, can you take care of the payment?”
My phone should be able to complete all of the steps above. And if I’m still eating gelato after 30 minutes, it should automatically extend my parking time.
Locking up specific functionality within apps limits the possibility of what software can really do for you.
The future of design is multimodal. Designers who continue focusing heavily on visual screen flows risk undermining the value of their profession.
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P.S. I started learning React again for the fifth time. But this time, I can use LLMs to dumb down programming concepts for me. There’s a concept I learned recently called imperative vs declarative programming. Imperative programming focuses on "how" to achieve a result by explicitly stating each step in a sequence, while declarative programming focuses on "what" needs to be done, describing the desired outcome without specifying the exact execution steps. I can’t stop thinking about the future of design becoming declarative.
P.P.S. Design’s “rendering of intent” is heavily influenced by the tools we use. If Figma is the tool we reach for, our intent over-indexes on visual design.
I tweaked this on Wed Jan 15 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)