The Shift to Just-In-Time UX: How AI is Reshaping User Experiences
Yannis Paniaras - 潘业思
Design Transformation, Generative UX, Enterprise AI, Blockchain, DeFI - @Microsoft
February, 2024
Microsoft Digital Studio & AI Center of Excellence.
Exploring the transformative power of conversational AI UX as a new form of 'UX teleportation'—a game-changer in user engagement. This article introduces a paradigm shift in UX design and product planning, offering a broad overview of the model.
The concept originated several months ago during ongoing work at the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence. This design model has since been applied externally in practical educational seminars, in collaboration with my colleague, Rajamma Krishnamurthy, Senior Director and Leader for Enterprise AI Strategy. It has yielded impactful results in facilitating the understanding and adoption of the transformative aspects of AI user experience (AI UX).
Back in October 2023, in the article "The AI Revolution: How Microsoft Digital (IT) is Responding with an AI Center of Excellence" I introduced the concept of UX teleportation. I detailed how AI-driven UX enables instantaneous access across applications and tasks, fundamentally transforming the user experience from Legacy to "Just-In-Time UX."
“We’re moving away from the legacy models of interaction and navigation of static product topologies. We’re transforming the user experience through AI and copilot-based experiences and creating new paradigms of interaction and navigation across a complex topology of services and products.
Our goal is to enable instant point-to-point access to all employee services with minimal or no navigation. It’s like experiencing UX-teleportation, where accessing a service becomes instantaneous.”
Just-In-Time UX represents a paradigm shift in design and could signify a significant leap toward more intuitive and efficient digital workflows. This shift challenges some of the most traditional notions of user experience design, such as hierarchical structures, the linearity of user journeys, and navigational frameworks. Even the term ‘user journey’ begins to take on a different meaning when an experience becomes probabilistic and non-linear.
Below, I present a series of simple illustrations to depict the concept of UX teleportation, with the hope that these diagrams will clarify what we mean by UX teleportation and the dimensions involved in it.
The scope of this article is to illustrate the fundamental abstraction of how AI UX bypasses most of the legacy UI and its representations. With minimal UI presence or a much leaner UI, the concepts of navigation and hierarchy become less relevant and may even disappear at some point in the future.
LEGACY UX
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JUST-IN-TIME UX
2 Axes of UX Teleportation
The initial system comprises two axes. The 1st axis represents a UX range for commanding from Macro-level UX to Micro-level UX (Fig 3). The 2nd axis represents a range associated with a Spectrum of Experiences, which could be scenarios within the same domain or across different domains (Fig 4).
For example, in the context of general employee experience on Axis 1: a Macro-UX operation might involve an employee conducting a comprehensive performance review. This process involves compiling feedback, assessing project outcomes, teamwork, personal objectives, and outlining plans for career progression. On the other hand, a Micro level UX operation could involve an individual employee simply reporting personal time off.
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Shifting our focus to Axis 2, the experience spectrum can now span both unified and non-unified experience areas. This applies even when the user has different types of 'Jobs To Be Done' that fall within the same unified domain (for example, the employee experience domain) or within specialized experience domains, such as when the employee uses specialized tools in IT, Legal, Engineering, or other fields.
The paradigm shift in our interaction with conversational AI UX, whether multimodal or single-modal, enables us to instantly shift focus from one UX moment to another.
In the following three slides, we illustrate a hypothetical trajectory of a user moving from Macro UX context, then traversing to a different UX tool or task closer to a Micro-UX context, and continuing to another tool with the most Micro-UX goal. This example is simplified, aiming to illustrate basic transitions. The focal point of this model is to demonstrate how AI UX tends to disrupt traditional UX design by dissolving the conventional aspects centered around linear and hierarchical experiences and rational product topologies.
Instead of adhering to linear and pre-scripted pathways—the old approach to UX—AI UX introduces a dynamic capability to pinpoint any micro-moment across a canvas that spans from macro to micro dimensions and across libraries of skills, apps, and tools. It's akin to UX teleportation: wanting to move from Tool A, task A1, to Tool X, task X7, and being able to do so instantly, within the same window and UI context.
In the world of UX, imagine everything moves as fast as teleportation, and everything's ready exactly when you need it. In this just-in-time UX landscape, the lines between different products start to fade. As boundaries become less visible, maintaining the notion of product identities also becomes more challenging.
Essentially, we begin to witness the impact of AI introducing greater abstraction in design, necessitating a shift in how designers and the design discipline approach definition and execution. Definitions will still be required, but they should embrace the nature of probabilistic outcomes—perhaps this could be termed the designer’s probabilistic design definition. This concept also extends to design execution, affecting the tangible outcomes of UX design.
In reflecting on the concepts presented, we see how conversational AI and UX teleportation are not just future possibilities but current realities reshaping our approach to design and interaction. These shifts challenge conventional boundaries and open up new avenues for innovation and user engagement.
Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments. Your insights can help us further develop and refine these ideas in practical ways.
AI Design + Theory + Practice + Innovation
Microsoft Digital Studio & AI Center of Excellence.