Yes/No/Cancel

The other day I received a quick question by text from my partner. The messaging app’s AI offered three auto-suggested responses within the notification bar:

Yes / Yeah / Yep

It offered me three easy ways to say yes, from most to least formal. What I really needed was a way to send a quick “No”. There’s two possible responses, possibly a third inconclusive one (“maybe”), but it only offered one option.

This reminded me of the old Windows desktop-driven applications. Who else remembers these? The quintessential scenario was closing a document with unsaved changes. One would be presented with these three options:

Yes / No / Cancel

It always rubbed me the wrong way that three options were given when only two courses of action existed. And before pressing Yes or No, you needed to read the dialog text carefully - would pressing Yes save then close, or would it close without saving? If you were like me, you’d hit cancel, save, then exit once more, hopefully unimpeded by clunky UX - and ironically justifying the existence of the third option.

It took longer than it should, but software makers have moved away from things like the Yes/No/Cancel dialog box. Yes, we have auto-save, particularly for anything cloud-based. But application designers now better account for user intent. Apple, for example, quickly took a step forward by renaming the buttons Save/Don’t Save/Cancel. But generally, current software design principles don’t burden the user with bad UX particularly since a small change in the code can make a big difference to the daily experience.

Back AI-suggested responses - what have we learned? How will software makers ensure the best possible experience for their users while allowing a model to create options that may not be predictable during development? It may have just been a suggested text response in my case but more impactful scenarios already exist and will only become more common.

I believe that new paradigms in UI/UX will need to be developed to account for AI models being integrated into products, much like it was the case with the advent of desktop-GUIs and mobile touchscreens. Until then, please know that two Yes’s from me mean a No.