3 min read

Nothing to Polish

Design has always been about shrinking intent distance. Now that more of it happens off a screen, I think judgment comes before polish, and novelty starts to look like a tax.

A detail of Kazimir Malevich's Black Square: a field of cracked black paint between two bands of white canvas
Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915 (detail). First shown in Petrograd that December, hung high in the corner where a Russian home keeps its icon. It's about as close as painting gets to a screen with nothing on it.

For forty years, designing software mostly meant arranging things on a rectangle. Buttons, menus, tabs, cards. Chat, voice, AR and VR all got treated like side quests with their own rulebooks. I think they’re the same thing. I lump them together as touchless interfaces. You say what you want, the system does it, and there’s no hunting or tapping in between.

Lately I open an app and feel tired before I touch anything. Finding the setting, the button, the right screen… it’s work. So I go straight to superintelligence (SI), say the thing, and it happens. The most useful tool in my day is basically a text box. It’s still designed. The type, the spacing and how fast it answers all matter. It’s just designed for doing, so there isn’t much to look at. Kind of a weird thing for a designer to admit.

A glass text field over two orange liquids, the orange edge bending where it passes under the glass’s rim, an orange cursor blinking before the words What should happen?, a voice button at its end
The most useful tool in my day.

Is design losing?

The “no UI” crowd has been saying for a decade that the best interface is no interface. Looking at where products are headed, they might be right. Once you get used to tools that just do the thing, color and motion and flourish start to feel like noise between you and what you came for. Apps are gonna undesign themselves to keep up.

Some of them might stop being apps at all. I think a lot of what we download today ends up living inside the operating system, and the interface gets generated on the spot when you ask for something. You’d only get a screen when words aren’t enough, like picking a seat on a flight or dragging a slider until a photo looks right. Most of the time you’d just get the result.

Big software companies copy whatever’s working, even when it makes no sense for their product. Everyone’s getting a chat box whether they need one or not. So unfortunately, even if the SI bubble pops, the habits it taught people aren’t going anywhere.

I don’t think that means design is losing though. The craft just moves. It ends up in decisions nobody sees, like what the system assumes, how it tells you it heard you, or whether to draw you a screen at all.

When the goal is feeling, novelty is the product.

When the goal is doing, novelty is a tax.

Intent distance

Every interface, from a button to a superintelligence, is a translator between what someone wants and what actually happens. I think design’s whole job is shrinking that gap. I call the gap intent distance. When the operating system can draw an interface on demand, that’s the test for whether a screen shows up at all. The screen, the mic and the goggles are just the costume.

So where does the craft go when there’s nothing to polish? Mostly into how well the system pays attention to you:

  • How well it understood you, including what you didn’t say.
  • How it tells you what it heard, in the fewest words that still let you catch a mistake.
  • What it assumes when you don’t specify. Defaults are the new layout.
  • How it recovers when it’s wrong.
  • When it speaks, when it stays quiet, and the tone of its voice, which is now the whole brand.

None of that depends on a platform. It’s all judgment. The closest thing I can think of is a great waiter or a sharp editor. You mostly notice their work by how little friction there is. Castiglione had a word for this about 500 years ago, sprezzatura, the art that hides its effort.

Raphael’s portrait of Baldassare Castiglione: a bearded man in a black hat and grey fur, looking straight out
Baldassare Castiglione, painted by his friend Raphael around 1514-15, now in the Louvre. The Book of the Courtier, published in 1528, is where he named sprezzatura, the art that hides its effort.

Spectacle

Meanwhile, designers can build heavier than ever. With code in hand, any headline can ripple and melt into place. I love that stuff. The home page of this site has liquid blobs on it, so I’m not one to talk.

There’s nothing wrong with spectacle. When the goal is feeling (a launch, a game, a brand moment), novelty is the product. When the goal is doing, it’s a tax.

A chart. Across the bottom, from doing to feeling. Up the side, the extra intent distance novelty brings. An orange line starts high at paying a bill, falls through onboarding and a launch page, and flattens near zero at a game.
How much intent distance novelty adds, from paying a bill to playing a game.

For the next ten years, I think the hard part is knowing which situation you’re in, and having the restraint to act on it.

How little does it take?

Composing the surface still matters. I’ll be drawing rectangles for a long time. What’s changing is the order. Judgment about when to show up and when to get out of the way is starting to come first, and the products that get it right will close the distance between what someone wants and what happens until there’s nothing left to polish.

That’s still craft. It just looks different now.

What’s the last app that made you tired before you even touched it? I’d love to hear.

Written by me, researched and edited with SI.