UX in the Age of AI - Part I

To understand how AI is going to change the system that is User Experience I need to talk about what UX is so we are all on the same playing field.? But first let’s imagine a world that already exists.? One where there are all sorts of free tools that can be prompted for the creation of images, text, code, and strategy.? Tools that can give feedback, modify their responses based on feedback from both humans and other tools and do it all in minutes, if not seconds.? Together, these tools are teams capable of end-to-end processes and product deliverables.? How does that make you feel??

User Experience Design (UXD), or Human-Centered Design (HCD) are methods that put people, or more specifically the users of products, at the center of design decisions.? Over the past twenty years UX and HCD have grown rapidly as an industry. Countless books, events, products all targeted at UX. (I’m not going to get into the fact that UX design existed before the name) Design schools started offering degrees in UX and more specifically ‘Design Thinking’, a methodology born out of Stanford and Ideo - a well known consultancy. I’ll leave you to do your own research, just know that ‘design’ for digital products matured and a lot of people made it their careers.

What does UX do?

To understand why AI is a concern for UX it’s best to understand the many aspects that normally fall into the category.? User Experience being a broad term means that there are a lot of definitions of it.? At the highest level it is “everything a user experiences.’ As a result, it is a generalist occupation that is made up of a lot of specialties.? Typically the more senior you become, the more of a generalist you are, having gained experience in specialties over your career.

The logical thing to ask, for the purpose of understanding what AI is going to change is “yeah, but what does UX do?”? It’s a great question, and it’s a lot! It’s also a heavily debated topic, but I’ll do my best cover most of them in logical order.

• Research - Includes both competitive product and user research.
• Analytics - Knowing my measures matter and where to find them.
• Business Strategy - Being able to understand the needs of business and align them to the needs of users.
• Journey Mapping - Defining the touchpoint of a product and aligning them to user needs and emotions.
• Information Architecture - How are you going to structure information?? What are you going to call navigation, directories, etc.? Done well, this is in close collaboration with SEO - which is also in for a big disruption.
• Wire framing - The creation of low fidelity representations of a product.
• User Interaction/Interface Design - How the product behaves when a user interacts with it.
• Visual Design - The color, branding, typography, images, motion, illustrations, style, etc that is applied to the wire frames, interactions, and interface.
• Design Systems - Making a reusable library of colors, fonts, components - like buttons and form fields, and templates from the visual designs.? This makes it efficient to scale UX to multiple products.?
• Storytelling - Being human centered means relating to humans, both internal teams and external users.? Storytelling has been shown to be the most memorable way to convey ideas.
• Content Strategy - A webpage or a product needs to have a logical structure and flow of content.? Content strategy is a specialty that focuses on what, where, and how you say something.
• Prototyping - Sketches, either visual or interactive that can be tested with users to validate a hypothesis.
• Accessibility - Making sure that a product can be experienced by all users is not just a legal requirement, it’s also the right thing to do.
• Personalization - More than anything, personalization needs good ux.? Without it, you get the wrong information at the wrong time.? You can’t find what you want and it makes everything harder.
• Front end development (Design Engineering) - Turning the designs and design system into code that can be deployed, is performant, and does what the designers intended requires a development specialty with user experience as their goal
• User Testing - In addition to the initial research, testing your product with users prior to wide release gives you the confidence that you’ve achieved users goals.
• Optimization - Once you have a product with users you need to continually improve it.? This is done strategically with research, analytics, and various forms of variant testing.

I told you it was a lot.? Congratulations and thank you if you’re still with me.

UX is everything?

Nope.? UX isn’t everything.? It is however everything that a user cares about.? One good way of thinking about UX in a design process is to to use the Design Thinking “Double-Diamond”.? The business starts with a problem to solve.? You then do discovery, explore and define multiple solutions, narrow your priorities, develop and test potential solutions, and finally deliver and optimize.?

Keep in mind that UX and the double-diamond can be applied to almost any industry.? From marketing to customer service, Digital and physical products, retail and more.? UX skills are largely universal - and this is important because domain specific information is not, and that is where AI is really going change things.

Part II.

Read Part II here.

Now that we have teased AI, established what UX does and when it does it, part II of this series will explore the different technology being used.

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