Don't forget the button

People love buttons.

I studied product design for three years. Sure, I failed miserably, but the single most important thing that sticks in my head from that time is that people. Love. Buttons. Every physical control on your car, your remote, your microwave, existed because an engineer decided a specific action deserved a specific object. Then somewhere around 2010, a ton of industries decided (for us) we didn’t want objects anymore. We all wanted glass. One flexible, frictionless surface that could become anything, on command, through software. Tesla ripped every button off the dash and put in a screen. BMW followed. Volkswagen took it further than anyone and touch-capped the steering wheel itself. Fewer buttons, more possibility, a cleaner future(?).

The reversal that wasn’t a reversal
Porsche put physical dials back in the 911 as Hyundai's global design chief has said publicly that the touchscreen-everything era went too far, and the company is walking it back. Volkswagen announced it's reintroducing physical buttons after years of customer complaints and dead-last usability rankings. The data on drivers hunting for the windscreen wiper at speed, eyes off the road, fingers finding nothing — disasters waiting to happen. The automotive industry assumed removing friction was the same thing as improving the experience. Sure, it removed the physical friction but the experience got worse.

Even big tech knew something was missing
The same instinct hit the screens in our pockets before it hit the cars on our driveways. iOS7 stripped away every faux-leather stitch and drop shadow that told you a thing was tappable, and usability testing afterward showed people genuinely couldn’t tell a button from a label anymore. Google looked at the same flat, affordance-free landscape and built the opposite response into an entire design language: Material Design, in 2014, explicitly modelled on paper and ink — surfaces that cast shadows, buttons that lift off the page and physically depress when you tap them, ripples that spread from your fingertip like you’d touched something with mass. Google wrote a spec sheet defining exact elevation levels for digital objects, in pixels, so that software could pretend to obey gravity. The underlying feeling of a real push was on the way back.

One of the world’s biggest companies built a visual physics engine for the screen, because the screen on its own wasn't convincing anyone a button was really there. That was a blatant admission that the flat design era broke something people needed, doused in theory and elevation grids that nobody had to say the word backwards.

Haptics is the true confession
Essentially the same story again, moved down from our eyes to our fingers. Once physical buttons were gone and people hated tapping on flat, silent glass, manufacturers spent millions engineering vibration motors to fake the feeling of a button. Apple's Taptic Engine. Samsung's linear actuators. Teams of engineers tuning the exact frequency of a synthetic thud so your finger believes something real just happened under it.

Material Design faked physicality with shadows and motion. Haptics faked it with vibration. Two completely different disciplines, a decade of R&D between them, arriving at the identical conclusion: the button was desire, and once it was gone, everyone had to spend serious money simulating the parts they’d thrown away.

Now do it again, but bigger
Which brings us to right now, the whole point of this button-based rant. This entire industry is mid-repeat of the exact same move — just at a much larger scale, and with much higher stakes. Every product roadmap in tech currently includes some version of ‘add AI.’ It has for the better part of 3 years, and the fatigue is real. No everyday, regular user is asking for more automation, more prediction, more of the interface disappearing into something ambient and invisible. Yet, it’s e v e r y w h e r e.

Your email client wants to write your replies. Your search bar wants to answer before you finish typing the question. Your car doesn't want your turn signal input anymore — it wants to negotiate the lane change with the car next to it on your behalf. Every one of these products is making the identical bet Tesla made with the touchscreen dash — that removing the moment where a human decides something and acts on it is a gift, not a loss. Nobody's asking the driver this time either.

Friction was never the enemy
A button works because it demands something from you first. Location — you find it by feel. Resistance — it pushes back until you commit. Confirmation — it clicks, and you know, with total certainty, that the thing happened because you made it happen. That small cost, that fraction of a second of deliberate contact, is exactly what gets erased every time a company decides your intention is a bottleneck standing between you and a ‘smoother’ experience.

AI-in-everything runs on the same premise as the touchscreen dash. It’s that friction is always the problem to be engineered out. But friction is frequently the feature wearing an inconvenient disguise as it's the proof that you meant to do the thing you tried to do. Automate the decision away and you don't just save someone a step — you take away the one piece of evidence that a person had any semblance of decision or control at all.

So, don’t forget the button
Companies keep discovering, expensively and after the fact, that people don't actually want everything decided for them in advance. They want the choice to still belong to them, even if it costs half a second and the friction of an actual press of a button. Buttons proved that once cars and phones tried to erase them and had to sheepishly bring tactile feedback back as an apology. Google proved it building a shadow-and-elevation system just to make a flat rectangle feel like something with weight. AI is about to prove it again, at a much larger scale, and probably after a lot more money gets spent finding out the hard way.

Don’t forget the button (do you get that the button is the metaphor yet?). It’s not the object, but the principle underneath it. Somewhere in every product, every workflow, every interaction you design, leave a place where a human being has to physically, deliberately, tangibly decide something and make it happen themselves. That small piece of resistance isn’t inefficiency. It'‘s the last reliable proof that a person was still there, on purpose, choosing.

Everything else can be automated. Let’s leave that button right there, though.