The interface should show what you need, not whatever the system happens to hold

Ola Nilsson · 2026-10-01

Boxes and buttons were never reality, but they gave people an overview. Chat is fast and fleeting. The interface we need shows what you need to see, right now.

A while back I wrote that old interfaces are a false sense of security. The boxes and buttons in a CMS were never more "real" than a chat window. They were just another way of displaying the same code. I still stand by that. But today I had a conversation that made me want to add some nuance.

I was right that boxes and buttons aren't reality. What I underestimated was what they actually did for people. They gave you an overview. You knew where you were, what was done and what was waiting. Ten people could look at the same screen and see the same thing.

That sense of security isn't false, it's pretty real.

And that's exactly where chat has a problem. It's brilliant at making things happen. It's worse at showing what has happened. Forty messages in: what's actually approved? Which version is current? Who changed the headline? The thing that makes chat fast also makes it fleeting.

So "chat or boxes and buttons?" is the wrong question.

The human in the middle

Where we landed was that the human has to be in the middle. Not as the one clicking through menus, but as the one who decides. The machine does, the human decides. The interface is where the human sees enough to make the call.

That sounds simple. It isn't, because "enough" means different things to different people.

A CMO wants to see what's waiting for approval and what's actually working. The copywriter wants the text, the brief and the brand notes side by side. The CEO wants three numbers and one sentence on why. A company in a regulated industry wants to show exactly who approved what, and when.

Same material, four completely different needs.

Old interfaces solved this by giving everyone the same view. The menus followed the system's structure, not your question. They were built around what was technically reasonable ten years ago, and then we got used to them. That's why you end up hunting for the button that "has to be here somewhere, damn it." It is there. It's just where the database wanted it.

When everything is there, anything can be shown

This is where something new happens. When a system has knowledge and memory, when every brief, every edit, every approval and every number is kept, the limit is no longer what can be shown. Everything can. The question becomes what's worth showing, to you, right now.

That's the idea we're building K+ around. Everything done on an account is kept, and it's all connected. So the view can be shaped around the person and the task, instead of the person adapting to the view. The CMO and the copywriter look at the same material, but each of them sees what they need.

The hard part is leaving things out

But let me be honest. This has to be done extremely well, or it ends up worse than what we had.

Showing everything is easy. It's just noise. The hard part is the selection: understanding what someone needs before they've asked, and letting the rest stay in the background until it's needed.

An interface that looks different every time you open it isn't smart. It's exhausting. People need to recognize where they are. Some things have to stay put, so the parts that adapt have something to move around.

Then there's the old argument against chat, that something can get overwritten or disappear. Take it seriously. If you let a machine do the work, you have to be able to see what it did and why, and be able to undo it. Traceability isn't one feature among many. It's what lets the human actually stay in the middle.

It will take a few rounds

We won't get it completely right at the start. Nobody does. It will take iterations and real users, and paying close attention to where people hesitate and what they go looking for.

Remember that the old interfaces also took decades of iteration before they felt safe. The safety didn't come from them being right. It came from us getting used to them.

So don't stay with the old because it's familiar. And don't jump to chat alone because it's new. Demand an interface that knows what you need to see. That's where we're heading.