Shifting UI paradigms: Feed. Story. Chat.

Every five to ten years software engineering and computer interfaces seem to be getting a newer user interface control. Every new such UI control seems to be more popular than the previous era’s hero UI control. Right now, we are in what I call the “Chat” generation. The generation before was all about the “Story” UI — which gave way to “reels” or “shorts”, and even the base interactions in live video streams. The era before that saw the rise of the “Feed” UI, with my earliest memories of such interfaces dating back to Facebook’s Wall, or Orkut’s post feed.

The Chat era started in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. It was preceded by the Story era, starting around 2014 with Snapchat’s rise in popularity. Snapchat’s user interface control to tell vanishing visual stories with highlights and text overlays became popular and eventually pervasive. While it started with social media, it soon found its way to places like LinkedIn¹ and Signal. Going as far back as 2008, we got the first draft of the modern-day social Feed, when Facebook first introduced the Wall. Facebook’s take was a refined version of feeds in MySpace or Orkut. But it paved the way to follow not just friends but social influencers.

None of these UI controls were new when they exploded in popularity. We have always had chat interfaces for instant messaging. RSS feeds with their focus on links likely seeded the idea for social media feeds. IRC chat streams gave way to information feeds we find ourselves in — both for group chats and microblogging feeds. The Story/Reel UI was a re-imagination of the photo carousel in portrait mode.

I sound reductive – although not intentionally. Truth is that these UI controls have undergone numerous iterations to situate themselves in newer information and interaction contexts. And while those iterations were key, such evolutions were driven by the demands and contexts of the time.

AI changed chat. The Chat interface had to evolve from a human-to-human paradigm to a human-to-bot paradigm. An explosion of multimedia – images and videos – compelled the creation of the Story control. The creators of the Story UI control needed fuse the complexity of annotations, fonts, colors and text boxes in PowerPoint presentations with the simplicity of photo slideshows. Social networking changed how we think about feeds in general. The feed of links had to iterate from serving a single-user experience in RSS readers to a social, multi-user experience that we find in modern social networks.

It is easy to pigeon-hole these advances as a product of social media. But the recent uptick in “chat” implementations has bucked that trend with applications in domains ranging from enterprise to programming. The Chat UI is a peculiar case for a different reason as well. Larger paradigm shifts like AI certainly evolved Chat as user interface control. But the UI control itself re-defined what social networks looked like. Even before AI took center stage, IM apps’ natural evolution to group messages reshaped what social media is. Think Slack, WhatsApp Telegram. Group messaging platforms took the 1-to-1 instant messaging interface, and expanded it to multiple users with one chat feed visible to all. At one point it caused Twitter to be relegated as nothing more than a public group chat. It also elevated IM apps like WhatsApp to a “social-network” status.

Each era offers a rich body for work for software engineers, designers, and product managers. That work entails reworking the whole software and product stack in light of these newer interfaces. In particular, think of — (a) implementing these frontend interfaces; (b) redesigning and re-implementing existing user-workflows around these newer interface paradigms; and (c) rewiring or tooling bank-end systems to support the evolving frontend.

The Chat era has been particularly replete with work, or re-work in many cases. So much so that we are now rethinking what browsers are. Interesting to see what UI control we get next, and what work it spurs.

1. I think of LinkedIn more as a professional network, than a social network. But happy to concede that i am splitting hairs 😁 ↩︎