Mini Essay: Emergent Interfaces

Imagine an interface. A simple web page with just a title, a list of items, a form to add a new item, and buttons to remove existing items.

The hallowed to-do app.

You click into the text field, type 'buy eggs', and hit 'done'.

Your item is added to the list.

You come back the next day, having bought your eggs, to check off your task. Today, though, you find a new feature: due date. You check off the eggs and add a new task, this time logging that you should call your Mom three days from now.

Three days go by.

You get a notification to call your Mom.

You revisit the to-do app after your call and check off the task. Today, another new feature: drag-and-drop the tasks to order them however you like. You take the opportunity to add a few more tasks for the upcoming week and log off.

You open the app again. It's been another three days.

There's a suggested task (yet another new feature) to buy eggs tomorrow.

You confirm the suggestion.

Every time you come back, there's something new. After using the app for a while, it finally settles into a comfortable state, only changing subtly, and nearly always to better suit what you use the app to do.

This is emergent UI. It is an evolution of the interface, based on the same principles as the evolution that shaped (and still shapes) living species on Earth. It starts with a simple idea. A page. A button. A form. Its 'genetic' makeup is constructed through its constraints, design systems, and goals. It adapts. Like evolution, mutations occur. They change the interface, the system. Then, as if by natural selection, those mutations determined to best achieve the system's directives are kept while the rest are discarded.

Over time, and with usage, the interface morphs to better suit the user. The system learns what the user wants to do - what they prefer, how they behave - and meshes it with the guidelines set forth at its creation.

The system observes, anticipates. It understands its components and how to create new ones based on its design systems. It becomes personal in a way that software has not been. It is not solely personal with regard to content, no. It is personal in its very design, its system. The interface you see, the buttons you click, the flows you use - they are all built for you.