The Moylan Arrow: IA Lessons for AI-Powered Experiences

Information allows us to act more skillfully. Imagine you come to a fork on a road. Without a sign, you’d need a compass or a great sense of direction to choose correctly. But with a clear sign, you’d quickly know which road to take. The sign reduces ambiguity.

The Moylan arrow, too, disambiguates a choice. Pulling in on the wrong side of the pump is an annoying inconvenience. By making the driver smarter, the arrow improves the car’s UX. Critically, it does so without much cost to the manufacturer. That’s why it’s become pervasive.

The Moylan arrow works because it’s:

• Clear: legible and understandable
• Findable: located where you’re already looking
• Relevant: provides the exact answer you need
• Contextual: available when needed, but “quiet” otherwise
• Obvious: doesn’t need further instructions
• Cheap: of negligible cost to manufacturers

Jorge goes on to compare this list to the latest crop of chatbots and finds it comes up lacking.

I found this set of heuristics helpful:

Rather than ask, “how might we add AI to this system?,” consider the following questions:

• What is the person trying to do?
• Do they understand the system?
• What’s keeping them from choosing skillfully?
• What questions do they have? Which come up repeatedly?
• Which structural distinctions are ambiguous?