"In the scenic paradigm, every digital experience followed a familiar script. Users navigated URLs, scanned menus, and translated their goals into the language of the interface. Click "Travel," then "Flights," then fill out departure, arrival, dates, and passengers. The burden was on the user to map their intent onto the system's structure. This worked when interfaces were simple and tasks were predictable. But as workflows grew more complex, the scenic approach began to break down."
"Consider Sarah, a product manager preparing for her team's next release. She's balancing deadlines with a lean team, trying to stay ahead of stakeholder feedback while keeping engineers unblocked. In the scenic world, she opens her project management tool to create epics and user stories, checks her analytics for usage data, reviews mockups in her design tool, schedules stakeholder reviews in her calendar, pings engineers on Slack, and updates timelines on her roadmap."
Design historically emphasized scenic interfaces with visual landscapes, buttons, navigation hierarchies, and choreographed journeys where the interface was the destination. Intent is semantic, anchored in meaning, purpose, and the unspoken why behind actions. Complex workflows reveal the limits of scenic design as users must map goals onto disparate tools and interfaces. AI enables semantic design by interpreting intent and responding to context rather than offering only explicit commands. Product managers and other users face fragmented tasks across tools; semantic systems can unify context, reduce translation burdens, and enable systems to understand and act on user purpose.
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