User Experience, AI and the Next Generation of Users
AspenTech’s operational technology (OT) solutions for asset-intensive industries are the industry leaders in business domains such as process design, refinery and chemical planning and scheduling, advanced process control, prescriptive maintenance and others.? The software scope spans design, operations and maintenance. Users take advantage of the decades of domain expertise built into the models and the richness and depth of capabilities and use cases in order to solve challenging optimization problems.? The software can be daunting for new users and requires familiarity and frequent use to gain the user skills to get the most out of the tools.? A new array of UX concepts combined with AI are positioning us to make this software exciting for a new generation of users.
Software developers have always known the importance of User Experience (UX), a concept dating back to the 1800s with Charles Babbage’s first mechanical innovations to provide the user’s access to his calculation engines. UX which encapsulates UX and UI has significantly evolved over time, from the Age of Tools and the Industrial Revolution to today's ‘Age of Self’ (characterized by a reliance on iPhones and personalized apps), which is characterized by the scaling of customer experiences.
With a new generation of users, new styles of learning, and new expectations based on the ubiquitous use of personal electronic devices, AspenTech is meeting those changes with a user experience initiative.? We are rapidly and strategically evolving our software to meet today’s imperative for a high level of usability and expectations of a quick learning curve to master these powerful and complex systems.
The integration of AI into UX is revolutionizing the field by offering personalized experiences, automating design tasks, and enhancing user engagement through real-time data analysis and conversational interfaces. AspenTech’s focus on providing quick, intuitive access to its applications, along with its exploration of generative AI and UX for creating self-organizing, personalized experiences, showcases its commitment to leveraging AI advancements to improve productivity and user satisfaction in industrial software.
The challenge of many user roles.?
A variety of industries benefit from AspenTech solutions, spanning Green-tech, oil and gas, chemicals, digital grids, mining and subsurface exploration. Within those industries, there are different types of users, meaning that a particular software system needs to be convenient and accessible to multiple roles such as process engineers, planners, control, and maintenance engineers, geologists, electrical engineers, and data scientists but also non-technical roles such as procurement teams, construction workers, and maintenance crews. A common theme among all these sectors is the importance of user experience (UX) as a key to unlocking the full capability of the software, often used collaboratively, across all of these roles.? For the sake of this article, we will use the more commonly referred to modern term of “UX” as one; UI is a subset of UX.
There are several phases of UX history that need to be credited:
The evolution of UX and AI spans from the Age of Tools, emphasizing primitive symbolic communication, through the Industrial Revolution's machine-centric innovations, to the mid-20th century's focus on UX. The emergence of the Age of Software in 1973 with the Xerox Alto heralded sophisticated graphical user interfaces, culminating in Don Norman's definition of "user experience" in 1995. Today's “Age of Self”, characterized by ubiquitous technology and the rise of mobile and post-mobile devices, demands AI-enhanced, seamless interfaces across diverse platforms, showcasing the ongoing advancement towards more personalized and intricate UX.
Front-and-center; AspenTech’s users require software to solve very complex industrial problems at scale, be very intuitive, and enable businesses to deliver new products ahead of their competition:? Process engineers need to design, modify, and evaluate manufacturing processes; goals include but are not limited to cost reduction, improving sustainability, and developing best practices within manufacturing processes.? Data Scientists need to extract actionable insights from data, communicate and translate the results, and understand the data to create actionable insights that align with the business goals.? Plant modelers use AspenTech tools to create models to evaluate, maintain and improve plant operations. The key for the modeler is to find constraints, connect and fine tune the model.? These experts and their unique skillsets are critical in running their businesses.
Other “casual users” need to access the work of these technical experts and use the results for areas such as safety, program management, procurement, sustainability reporting, maintenance and the like.??
The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into User Experience (UX) is poised to significantly influence the next steps in UX, particularly as we move further into the era of immersive technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) and what Apple refers to as Spatial Computing with their product labeled Vision Pro.
AI and UX, the next frontier:? Here's how AI is expected to shape the future of UX.
AI is revolutionizing UX by enabling personalization at scale and automating routine design processes. Through real-time analysis of vast data, AI achieves hyper-personalization, enhancing user engagement and satisfaction with content and recommendations tailored to individual behaviors and preferences, and simplifying the task of satisfying multiple user roles. Additionally, AI tools are optimizing the design workflow by automating user and A/B testing, which speeds up the identification of user preferences and issues, allowing design teams to focus on strategic decisions rather than time-consuming testing processes.?
Moreover, AI's role in UX extends to ensuring ethical design practices and privacy, enhancing accessibility, providing predictive user experiences, facilitating conversational interfaces, and enabling continuous learning and adaptation. Designers are tasked with creating transparent, bias-minimized experiences that respect user privacy while also adapting interfaces in real-time to accommodate users with disabilities. The predictive capabilities of AI offer smoother, more intuitive user experiences, and the rise of conversational interfaces demands innovative approaches to design. As AI continues to evolve, UX specialists are challenged to embrace these technologies to develop more intuitive, engaging, and user-centered designs, marking a significant shift in how digital products are conceived and improved.
Customers are looking for ways to access and understand applications more rapidly, emphasizing the need for a user interface that is both simplified and intuitive. They are seeking solutions that automate processes to minimize manual effort, alongside faster deployment, and installation of applications. This highlights a growing demand for efficiency and ease- of-use in operational tools.?
Furthermore, there is a strong desire for reliable application decisions and trustworthy API documentation, ensuring that the technology they rely on is both dependable and transparent. By automating routine tasks, customers aim to leverage the computational power of AI and UX together, enhancing productivity and streamlining their workflows.
Aspen is the world leader in developing first-principal models that enable end-to-end optimizations for all personas in all our industries.? While we don’t have a crystal ball into the future of generative AI and UX, we can be sure that we know both have left the gate and AI is already being used in our applications. Industrial AI is already being used in our products including Aspen's Virtual Assistant (AVA), Hybrid Models, DMC3 Deep Learning IQ, Maestro based accelerated deployment of advanced process control, Mtell prescriptive maintenance, Rock facies classification, OptiPlant automatic pipe routing, and renewable generation forecasting.
UX has already revolutionized how we interact with technology.? The emergence of Generative AI is poised to further transform technological interfaces and functionalities.? By integrating UX principles with Generative AI, we anticipate a future where industrial software evolves into a highly adaptive, self-organizing set of systems that offer personalized user experiences.
领英推荐