While procrastinating on filing my taxes, I happened to stumble across two very different blog posts that touched on the same topic, applied to cars and github. These are long reads, but I highly recommend checking them out. Putting them together, I thought about the ever-evolving nature of user interfaces and how a company can never grow complacent.

User interface is quite possibly the most important problem for any company to solve today. With endless options and powerful technology behind all of them, consumers gravitate to the apps and products that are easiest to use. Remember when everything came with an instruction manual? Now it would be an admission of failure to design your product properly.

As the two mentioned blog posts highlight, systems start with a (good) simple design and gradually add features to it until “a proliferation of features has overwhelmed the ‘job to be done'”. These subsequent features are jammed into the original design, even though they weren’t part of it and don’t necessarily fit. Eventually, the bloated system is all add-ons and no design, and it’s painful to use. At this point the owner of the system has two choices: redesign or die.

This is why people are rushing to redesign GitHub. It’s a great tool that was designed well when introduced, but over the past decade it has succumbed to feature bloat. The first half of the linked post does a great job of redesigning and simplifying, although the second half takes a bit of a left turn. Car UI’s are no different, and are going to become exponentially more important as cars themselves get smarter with more sensors. We might not have self-driving cars for a long time, but our cars will work with us in more intelligent ways and feed us more data than ever before. The design needs to invert, flip the melting iceberg.

The author of the car post uses smartphones as an example, with the old Nokia phones falling by the wayside because Nokia couldn’t create a functional UI, but I argue that modern smartphones are entering that same phase. The settings menu of your phone has over 200 options, some which I’m sure you aren’t even aware. The first iPhone had a clean interface which worked great for its limited set of options, but we need a different design altogether now that phones have entered almost every aspect of our daily lives. Five years from now, I hope that you’ll be talking to your phone like a friend, explaining your preferences for its behavior, instead of scrolling through menus and searching like a barbarian, trying to remember the name of a feature. Your home should join it five years after that, and your car in ten.