AI-Chatbots are the new Apple Settings Search

I visit amazon only very infrequently, but this week was one of these rare occasions. I was braced to navigate myself through the jungle of "very long and obfuscated product title to match as many search queries as possible, but to give the user as little information as possible at the same time, because fuck the user" and ended up with a cross-stitch fabric that would fuel my newly awakened obsession for another week. Luckily, I did not have to look for any specifics. Just a small glance over the product page revealed the same user friendliness as the title¹. However I stumbled across Ask Rufus, the AI-chat to clarify any questions the user has.

And hoooold on! This is the wrong direction. A cross-stitch fabric is just a simple fabric woven in a pattern. Its product page should be so small that even Donald Trump can fit it into his brain. But instead of simplifying a convoluted page, they add yet another feature to find things on there². Because apparently the literal search bar to find information on the page was not found by users anymore, because it was below the page fold³.

While LLMs definetely have their uses, using them as band-aid on top of an another already shitty band-aid is not the way.

It's like the Apple Settings Menu all over again.

The problem now is that instead of just hating their users (by abandoning best practices without cause), they started hating their users' pets too.

With the introduction of search bars in (e.g.) menus, the structure of menus got considerably worse. Have you ever asked yourself why Repair IDE is under File in intelliJ? Or why Find is in the Edit Category, while Find everywhere is under Navigation? Once the "convenience" of discoverability is added, the browsing experience gets significantly worse. A search bar removes all incentive to maintain a consistent and intuitive structure, but at least it does not degrade the content itself. For example, tagging and synonyms still need to be maintained to provide a working search. With AI-chatbots there is no such need and no need to clean data for a humanly comprehensible presentation.

"Just use the search" becomes "Just use the chatbot". Except now you have a mandatory delay, hallucinations, and non-determinism in the mix.

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