A friend once told me that for him, one of the weirdest moments as a parent was the realization that their kids have a relationship with each other, not just with him. That conversation always stuck with me, and when our own daughters started to have a bond with each other that’s completely separate from their bond with us, I understood what he meant. It’s just something that is, for some reason, very difficult to wrap one’s head around—these people you made, suddenly having lives apart from you. Today I’m thinking of that conversation again, but in a very different context—personal AI assistants, and what that means for how we design their interfaces.

But before I get there, let me take a step back and recap some of the recent conversations about personal AI. In The internet bundle is already here Dieter Bohn writes that AI personal assistants are a threat to net neutrality:

The bundle is already here, it came from places we haven’t been watching closely enough, and it has many names. There’s more than enough doomsaying about the issues related to Instant Articles, Internet.org, and Binge On. Instead, I’d like to take a minute to doomsay what could become the other opponents to the kind of free, transparent, and open internet we all want: Siri, Cortana, Alexa, Facebook M, and Google Now.

These intelligent assistants are great. I use them every day and expect I will continue to use them for, well, ever. But there’s a problem that’s built into them: they only seem to work with certain parts of the web and — here’s the real rub — certain apps.

Mark Wilson makes a similar argument in Why Every Gadget You Own Suddenly Wants To Talk To You, and then takes the argument further to imagine what happens when you have a bunch of non-neutral devices in your home:

But the problem with a scenario in which you can talk to anything is that you’re no longer talking to one thing. Only so many ears can live in one room. If I muse aloud that I need more shampoo in the shower, what hears me? Is it my iPhone sitting at the sink? Alexa networked in my apartment? Some new smart water nozzle from Kohler? […]

As consumers, we’re caught in the middle of the convenience. Do we choose to side with Siri, Alexa, or Cortana, and talk only to her, despite looming bias and the risk of growing dependent on a single voice—a voice that could take advantage of us? Or do we side with a free market that gives a voice to every stupid overzealous object in our lives, however confusing that may be, in a world where ordering milk becomes a bidding war on a commodities training floor?

Which future do you root for? They both sound horrible.

All of this is part of a big “the conversation is the interface” trend we’ve been seeing a lot of recently (see The search for the killer bot and 2016 will be the year of conversational commerce). From a design perspective the main challenge we seem to be thinking about is how to give these AI assistants the right personality (see The Next Phase Of UX: Designing Chatbot Personalities and The New Intimacy Economy). But I wonder if that’s the wrong AI design focus. I wonder if we should rather spend our time encouraging design for what Alan Cooper calls The Edges:

The difficulty in making these systems work smoothly comes from their edges, not from their centers. Each vendor builds a reliable and effective product, and through diligent testing assures that they meet high standards of performance. The only place where those standards fall is at the edges, where the maker is unsure of the requirements.

The edges are the interfaces with entities outside their control, outside their offices. Out there they are a little unsure of what they have to do and what forces affect them. Inside the company’s four walls they know exactly what they’re making, how it should behave, and what it should do. But for the entities outside those four walls, some measure of haziness creeps in, notably, the user.

Applied to AI assistants (and back to my parenting story), this means we need to start thinking about not just how humans interact with Siri and Alexa, but how Siri and Alexa interact with each other. There is, of course, a huge disconnect here between user needs and business goals. It would be very beneficial for users if different AI assistants could interact with each other, but that doesn’t help companies to strengthen their silos.

The trouble is that if we don’t figure out how to do this (and do it profitably), we might lose more than the battle of whose personal assistant wins. We might lose the war of personal AI getting any significant user adoption.

I’ve long held Jakob Nielsen’s Useful = usability + utility formula in high regard. The Introduction to Usability article it comes from is still one of the best intros to user experience I’ve seen. That said, I’ve recently started to wonder about the ideal ratios on the right side of the equation. What combination of usability and utility results in the most useful product? Is it a 50/50 split? 70% usability, 30% utility? It’s a purely academic exercise because there’s no way to prove any of it, but it did lead me to a theory:

I believe that utility (whether a product provides the features users need) is initially more important than usability (how easy & pleasant these features are to use) in product design.

Let me say right up front that I’m not saying usability isn’t important. I’m just saying that when it comes to a product being used extensively (and payed for) by users, it is more important to get the utility right from the start. Users will struggle through bad usability (up to a point), but they won’t use a wonderfully usable product that doesn’t serve a real need (see Path).

I’ll give two personal examples to back up this view1. My favorite social network at the moment is Goodreads. The site is slow, the UI is confusing, and the mobile apps make me feel completely lost, and yet I keep coming back to it. Because Goodreads is extremely good at what it does: helping me find books I’d enjoy, and letting me share good books with friends.

The second example is Pinboard. If I could take only one website with me to a deserted island it would be Pinboard. I use it more than any other online service. It helps me save, categorize, and find all the useful articles I’ve read over the 5 years I’ve been using it. The UI has tons of little weird quirks, and it’s very much barebones. But that doesn’t matter. It’s indispensable to me, so I care very little about its usability.

These two examples lead me to a second theory:

The more utility a product has, the less its usability matters.

I like Goodreads, but at some point if the usability becomes too frustrating, I’ll just leave. For Pinboard, on the other hand, I’ll walk through usability hell and back just to keep using it. It’s that essential to my work.

I’ve said this a few times in this article, but let me reiterate: I’m not, for a second, saying that usability isn’t important. I’m proposing that if you have a product that has insane levels of utility, its usability becomes a secondary factor in its success. To put it another way, the ROI on increasing utility is probably much higher than the ROI on improving usability.

The moral of the story is this: first find an idea that people can’t live without, then make it a beautiful, usable product. It’s very difficult to do it the other way around.

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1. That’s how science works, right? ↩