The way web experiences work today has been dead for a long time. As more users begin to realize just how dead the web is, they will crave a new paradigm, they will crave real-time experiences.

The Current State

The web today primarily works in one direction - a user initiates some action like loading a page or clicking a button and data is returned to them.

Sure there are "push notifications" but mostly there are unhelpful, annoying, and cluttered. They are one of the biggest UX-fuckups since Google started prioritizing ads over helpful search. Notifications are shit and they are intrusive.

Pain Point

People whine that modern user experiences are "shortening our attention spans".

There's a bit of truth to this. I probably watch hundreds of seconds-long Instagram Reels while I'm doing my zone 2 cardio on the treadmill. What the statement misses though is the root cause.

Root Cause

Why are we craving faster-iterating, shorter-duration interaction with content?

Simple.

It's closer to reality.

Pretend you and I are playing a game of catch (don't worry I'll give you a catcher's mask). You are the client and I am the server. A sequence of events unfolds:

1. You throw me the ball (user initiates an event)
2. I catch the ball
3. I think about how hard or gentle to throw the ball back (business logic, crunching the numbers)
4. I decide to throw you a 90MPH fastball (must be a grumpy day for me!)
5. You catch it (user receives data, in this case, slightly painful)

Between 01 and 05 on the web, you're just sitting there with your thumb up your ass. Maybe there's a loading spinner or something to keep you mildly entertained.

This downtime is now unacceptable to modern users!

Between 01 and 05 in our real-world catch example, you're receiving a ton of visual stimuli to keep you busy and engaged in the experience. You're observing my catch, as I think about how to throw the ball back you see my brow furrow and think, "he looks weirdly angry, is he going to throw a fastball?", as I wind up to throw your brain is working to calculate the angle and speed of the ball's arrival. Even if you look passive from the outside, your mind is extremely active and engaged even while you aren't holding the ball.

New Way

Users will gravitate towards the real-time web and leave the old, dead web.

Modern user experience must be real-time. This means everything must be streamed. The entire application architecture must be built with this in mind. Today's tooling is nascent but it always is in the first stage of any technological paradigm change.

Examples

These are just a few examples of how this is being done well.

Anduril

Most tech people clutch their pearls when thinking of how tech might be used by the defense industry. While a full refutation of the idiocy embodied by that stance is exceeds the scope of this article, I will remind readers that most notable technological advancements come from the defense industry. Ever used SQLite in a project? Invented at General Dynamics for the Navy.

I had a front-row seat watching Anduril's Lattice user experience change and grow over time when I worked there. Obviously no live demos available but you can see a demo on YouTube.

The defense startup space is HOT right now so I wouldn't be surprised if we see engineers rotating out of places like Anduril, Palantir, Saronic, Vannevar Labs, etc. to more public-facing companies and bringing some of the philosophy behind real time user experiences with them. Speaking from experience, once you see the kind of experience a real-time system provides the user, you want to bring that level of interactivity to other domains.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT's voice interface is another useful model. Although the AI isn't good enough to be extremely useful yet, the interface is great. Talking and listening are real-time experiences. The room for improvement in this case would be making the experience more multimedia rich. Right now there's an audio-reactive dot on the screen.

The naive implementation would be to have a computer-generated talking face on the screen.

The creative implementation would be to spatially visualize the thoughts and references that the AI is pulling from as it thinks and speaks its response.

Real life is happening right now, not 200ms from now. Ignore this and nobody will use your app a few years from now.