Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
I had sort of an &quot;aha&quot; moment reading a non-technical co-workers conversation on Slack the other day. Someone built a Slackbot to show the menu for whatever food truck is outside our building that day, and people could use it just by typing &quot;&#x2F;foodtruck&quot;. They were blown away and loved it. Rather than opening a browser and navigating some disparate menu pages, they could simply fire off a command in their &quot;console&quot;.<p>I realized that people love Slack because it has introduced them to the CLI paradigm of computing for the first time. CLI is <i>so</i> much more efficient and powerful if users can somehow be incentivized to put in the time and effort to become productive, which Slack has focused on a lot. As inefficient and silly as it may seem to us developers, Slack with it&#x27;s endless command based integrations has succeed wildly at that where nothing else has so far.