Fabrizia Ausiello, writing for UX Collective, uses Apple’s Liquid Glass transparency slider to ask who is supposed to make interface judgment calls:
Apple just introduced a transparency slider for its Liquid Glass UI — a control that lets users dial up or down the translucency of system elements. On the surface, it’s a thoughtful accessibility gesture (especially considering the criticism that Liquid Glass has accumulated), but in practice, it’s the manifestation of a deeper tension that designers have been circling for years: when you give users a knob, are you empowering them or just finishing your job somewhere more convenient?
Ausiello on the older design assumption that users shouldn’t have to make these calls:
For most of the history of digital product design, designers have been making decisions so users don’t have to. We studied, tested, iterated, and then shipped something that worked. Interface design is opinionated because it has to be.
It might sound arrogant, but it really isn’t, it’s simply part of the craft that’s baked into the role. The whole point of a well-designed system is that it removes cognitive load; the moment you ask a non-technical user to evaluate the “level of transparency” of their interface, you’ve already failed them because they don’t have a mental model for it, they just want to read their notifications.
I agree. As designers, we should be making this call. Ausiello turns the same question back on us:
If you work in digital product design, this moment is worth paying attention to for the precedent that it’s setting.
As AI takes over the execution layer — generating screens, producing variants, handling repetitive interface decisions — the value of a designer is shifting and the role that remains is the harder one: understanding the problem deeply enough to know which decisions shouldn’t be delegated at all.
Some things should be personalised, some should not, and knowing the difference, having the conviction to hold that line, is a skill needed and worth having. Dumping a slider in onboarding isn’t personalisation — it’s a designer who didn’t finish their job.
The future of adaptive interfaces is exciting, but getting there doesn’t mean abandoning judgment in the present. It should mean being more deliberate about which decisions belong to the system, which belong to the user, and which belong to you.
Interestingly, Ausiello also gives Apple an out. That maybe, Apple is playing the long game here and gathering data to make personalization more automatic in the future. The author again:
The reasoning goes roughly like this: we don’t need to commit to a specific default, because the AI will figure out the right setting for each user eventually. Siri will learn your preferences and you’ll just ask it to make things more readable and it’ll handle the rest. Seen from this perspective, the slider isn’t a UI failure, but rather an early, manual version of something that will eventually be automatic.
Honestly, I think it’s a bit of a stretch. Nice thought exercise though.
