"The Ladder of Abstraction"🪜
Today’s post is inspired by Amelia Wattenberger from the design team at Adept.ai.
If you are involved in building AI products, you will likely come across the phase of designing the user interface (UI).
Can today’s AI change the way we interface with products?
YES! And it’s going to blow your mind!
The key to interacting with digital products today revolves around information consumption. In other words:
The bulk of knowledge work involves, in essence, getting information, transforming or reasoning about it, and acting on it.
This is where AI excels.
What is The “Ladder of Abstraction”?
Think of Google Map.
My friend got married over the weekend at the Stanford Memorial Church. When I view the map, I can see the detailed building structure, nearby facilities, bus stop icons, and road and building names. This allows me to easily find and navigate among different facilities, such as planning a walking route from a bus stop to the church.
However, this detailed view may not be the best for showing how to get to the church from my location in South Bay. When I zoom out slightly, the map displays a broader range of locations but loses some of the finer details. In this view, I can no longer see the specifics near the church, but I can identify farther locations, cities, streets, and stores, like the Stanford Shopping Center. Perhaps I can stop by the mall for a gift on my way to the church.
Zooming out even more reveals cities, highways, and terrains more clearly. This broader perspective helps me plan my trip better, especially if I’m traveling from a distant location like Mill Valley.
Zoom out further, and only the shapes of states and countries become visible. This perspective is useful for thinking about long-distance travels, such as a plane ride from Washington to San Francisco.
Now you get what I mean.
The idea of the Ladder of Abstraction is very simple, it suggests that,
the exact same object can be represented at many different levels of detail.
Why is this important?
Have you ever seen or used a paper map?
Have you ever considered how your brain processes information when you open a landing page, or an application on your phone?
There are only so much information our brains can effectively digest. Different tasks require different details, and much of the information available may not be necessary.
Wouldn't it be convenient if information always came in, knowing exactly what we need at all times?
AI to the rescue
Following this principle, we can create vastly different user experiences and perhaps that’s gonna be the future.
Book Example
Here's an illustrative use case of a zoomable book. The top-left version represents the original format. Leveraging LLM, we now have three levels of zoomed-out versions: the top-right one summarizes every paragraph; the lower-left version summarizes every 10 paragraphs; and the lower-right version condenses the content to one sentence per chapter.
This is not only helpful for reading but also for writing! When crafting an extensive plot, having access to a mind map showcasing the evolution and connections of chapters at different levels would be truly awesome!
Airbnb Booking Example
Another example introduced by Amelia was about booking on Airbnb. Imagine if Airbnb could zoom in and out?
The version of the listing at the top represents the traditional view, which includes all the details. My usual workflow would be opening tons of tabs in my browser for different listings, and it’s quite hard to compare. Plus, I may not need all the detailed information. The lower image displays a slightly zoomed-out version, providing key information that I care about.
Most importantly, I’m not sacrificing the ability to take actions here. I can directly reserve the place right there at the zoomed-out view.
What if I want to compare the 50 tabs I’ve opened, mixing Airbnbs and Hotels?
Certainly, I can zoom out to a spreadsheet view to compare different listings based on the criteria that I care about like price, walk distance and reviews on Wi-Fi quality etc.
And even more, I can still take action at this level. If I spot a winner, there’s still a “Reserve” button that I can click to finalize my bookings.
But wait, there’s more!
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