为人工智能时代设计

"Where we're going, we don't need roads"
— Doc Brown, Back to the Future

"我们要去的地方，不需要道路"
—— Doc Brown, 回到未来

For decades, interfaces have guided users along predefined roads. Think files and folders, buttons and menus, screens and flows. These familiar structures organize information and provide the comfort of knowing where you are and what's possible.

几十年来，界面一直引导用户沿着预定义的道路前进。想想文件和文件夹、按钮和菜单、屏幕和流程。这些熟悉的结构组织信息，并提供了知道自己在哪里以及可以做什么的舒适感。

This understanding of interfaces has shaped my perspective on design throughout my career, leading me to see design as largely deterministic. I could visualize how interactions would work. The sequence when a user clicks a button, how information appears, how it adapts to different screens. It's dynamic, but predictable. I could visualize the user's journey and think about how to improve it.

这种对接口的理解塑造了我整个职业生涯中的设计视角，使我将设计视为在很大程度上是确定性的。我可以想象交互是如何工作的。用户点击按钮时的顺序，信息如何出现，如何适应不同的屏幕。这是动态的，但可预测的。我可以想象用户的旅程，并考虑如何改善它。

That changes with AI and LLMs.

随着AI和LLM的出现，这种情况发生了变化。

After ChatGPT's release, the chat interface quickly became the "AI native" standard. This makes sense on the surface – LLMs output text, and chat interfaces are familiar. Language itself is a powerful interface that removes traditional UI barriers. You simply have a conversation. But although useful for some tasks, they aren’t optimal for specific use cases.

在ChatGPT发布后，聊天界面迅速成为“AI原生”标准。这在表面上是有道理的——LLM输出文本，而聊天界面是熟悉的。语言本身是一个强大的接口，消除了传统UI的障碍。你只需进行对话。但尽管对某些任务有用，它们并不适合特定的用例。

Prompting is essentially like writing a spec, sometimes it's hard to articulate exactly what you want and ultimately control the outcome. Two people looking for the same thing might get wildly different results just based on how they asked for it, which creates an unprecedented level of dynamism within the product.

提示本质上就像编写规范，有时很难准确表达你想要的东西，并最终控制结果。两个寻找相同事物的人可能会因为他们的提问方式不同而得到截然不同的结果，这在产品中创造了前所未有的动态水平。

This shift from deterministic traditional UI to something more unbridled raises a challenge for designers: with no predictable journeys to optimize, how do you create...