3 Generations of Experience Technology

Summary: Past, present, and future user experience: lean-back, lean-forward, and be-inside. A combination of AI and gaming will create a more immersive user experience than current PC usage.

Are you ready for a world where static videos are obsolete and AI crafts personalized, interactive narratives? In the future of computing, traditional software becomes extinct, replaced by AI-native workflows that blur the lines between reality and digital experiences.

I recently watched an interesting video with Marc Andreessen and Andrew Chen from A16Z, recorded at the Speedrun gaming event. They discussed how games have been a driver of tech innovation but often also caused moral panics among the non-gaming public which feared that violent video games would cause gamers to commit atrocities. This again leads to the risk of naïve (or manipulative) politicians proposing useless regulations that stymie innovation without reducing any of the problems they claim to address.

Turning to more positive aspects of gaming, Andreessen and Chen raised the possibility of a new media form that merges interaction and user choice with traditional (non-interactive) movies. AI introduces the possibility for a new art form: an experience created on the fly. AI can already create content, but not yet in the form of an ongoing immersive story that unfolds according to the user’s input. (Or many users’ input in the form of “massive multiplayer dreams,” as Andreessen calls it.)

As an analogy, Chen pointed out that the original assumption for user-generated video was that people would create shorter versions of Hollywood-style movies. Instead, users created a broad variety of media-native formats, such as unboxing videos that have become more engaging than traditional films for many people. Personally, I often prefer watching user-generated YouTube videos instead of filmed entertainment from Netflix and the like. (My very link at the top of this article to a conference discussion is an example of a video format that’s more interesting for the right audience — such as myself and hopefully you — than most traditional movies that need an audience in the hundreds of millions.)

Andreessen posits that people may not want to watch prerecorded static videos in the future. It will be like watching silent movies. The benefits to the viewer from a dynamically generated video that’s optimized for the individual user and reacts to him or her in real-time will be overwhelming.

C&A then turned to a more general discussion of AI’s potential: it can’t be compared to recent computer revolutions such as the Web and mobile. Instead, AI is a new form of computing. A big question is whether a few huge AI models from a few incumbent companies will dominate or whether many companies will offer a broad variety of AI, both big and small.

Past, present, and future user experience. (Leonardo)

If the analogy is mobile, then mostly existing companies will be fine. Yes, there were some new mobile-native companies like Uber, but many mobile services are just adaptations of existing companies. There’s no mobile-specific search engine or mobile-specific ecommerce. Existing services simply added a mobile-optimized UI.

However, AI is different. For example, taking Photoshop and adding an AI feature is not how people will create images in the future. Instead, they will use services like Midjourney and Leonardo based around AI-native workflows rather than AI features added to legacy workflows.

The end of the session discussed the potential for solving education and health care through a games-like approach. Obviously not Grand Theft Auto, but the result of investing an equivalent degree of creativity (about a billion dollars’ worth of creatives’ time) in making the most engaging version of an online course. Or making it sufficiently engaging to exercise and lose weight to keep people from getting sick.

Future UX may benefit from huge investments in non-work experiences, such as makin g it engaging to exercise. (DallE)

Even though this video was a session at a games conference, the discussion was really about the future of computing and interactive media. Games may be an early indicator of where we’re going when AI permeates everything. Recommend watching the full discussion!

Here’s a summary of the 3 experience generations. In many ways, the future experience envisioned in this video will blend the old and the current styles of experience. This table is purely my responsibility, based on my thinking after watching the video with Andreessen and Chen. Don’t blame them.

Ideogram’s rendering of the 3 experience generations.

About the Author

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a usability pioneer with 41 years experience in UX and the Founder of UX Tigers. He founded the discount usability movement for fast and cheap iterative design, including heuristic evaluation and the 10 usability heuristics. He formulated the eponymous Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience. Named “the king of usability” by Internet Magazine, “the guru of Web page usability” by The New York Times, and “the next best thing to a true time machine” by USA Today.

Previously, Dr. Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer and a Member of Research Staff at Bell Communications Research, the branch of Bell Labs owned by the Regional Bell Operating Companies. He is the author of 8 books, including the best-selling Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (published in 22 languages), the foundational Usability Engineering (27,111 citations in Google Scholar), and the pioneering Hypertext and Hypermedia (published two years before the Web launched).

Dr. Nielsen holds 79 United States patents, mainly on making the Internet easier to use. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Human–Computer Interaction Practice from ACM SIGCHI and was named a “Titan of Human Factors” by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

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