UI Tectonic Plates are on the Move?

After 50 years, it looks like the UI tectonic plates are on the move.

Modern UI is the far cousin of ideas born in the famous Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) laboratory in the mid-70s. This was the place that invented concepts like windows, icons, menus, and pointers—the WIMP paradigm—as well as files, folders, and the trash can. And, equally famously, Xerox never succeeded in capitalizing on any of those inventions. Something that cannot be said for macOS, Windows, and every other modern OS that took "inspiration" from the Xerox lab at the time.

This UI paradigm was so successful that we haven't even been able to imagine an alternative. We took it for granted. It shaped how humans interact with machines for the last 50 years—from desktop to web to mobile apps. It just clicked with the way we do the things.

The Bottleneck We Stopped Seeing

However, this approach assumes a mouse and keyboard as the input devices. Step back and look at the keyboard: even if you're a blind typist and very fast, using a keyboard is akin to the speed of a dial-up modem. It's an obvious bottleneck in communication between our brains and machines.

We run around the screen searching for icons, clicking, and typing. And there's a feeling that this cannot be the final UI frontier. There must be a different, more natural, faster, and more intuitive way for humans to talk to machines.

And, you guessed it, there is: Voice.

The New Paradigm

If voice increasingly becomes the new brain-computer interface, what will this new UI paradigm look like?

My guess: it will look much more fluid and intuitive. You will just talk to the computer, and things will magically happen. The UI—with all its icons and windows—won't stand in the way of finishing your tasks. You ask, and it is done. This doesn't mean to say that typing will go away entirely, but it will become more on call when precision is needed.

What means something like this:

• Voice: "Draft an email to Sarah about the Q4 results"
• Keyboard: Fine-tuning the wording, fixing a specific sentence
• Voice: "Send it"

Let's imagine a classic CRM application through this new lens.

Old way:

Go to project page → Press menu → Check table → 
Find export option → Select format → Choose destination → 
Enter file name → Confirm

New way:

"Export the Acme project data to my desktop."
"What should I call the file?"
"Q4-summary."
Done.

You don't navigate to a project page, press a menu, and scan a table. You simply ask the machine what you want—and voilà, it's there for you.

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That's the shift. Things just happen. And the interface? It gets out of the way.