Column: Conscious Experience Design

As we enter 2024, artificial intelligence (AI) is part of virtually every product-design conversation. Companies are racing to incorporate AI into their products, hoping to push the limits of innovation to attract and engage customers and impact the business’s bottom line. As UX designers, our charter is always to create seamless relationships between users and digital products. AI represents a whole new field of possible experiences.

Now, with AI ubiquitously underpinning so many new products, I believe the biggest challenge of 2024 will be thoughtfully placing AI at the forefront of innovation by understanding users’ perspectives, needs, concerns, and objectives. AI can and will do many amazing things. The big question is: what should it do?

In this column, I’ll share some of my reflections regarding the adoption of AI by users, focusing particularly on what we’ve learned about their expectations and attitudes. Read More

As UX designers, along with the rest of the world today, we’re hyperaware of the impact and momentum of generative artificial intelligence (AI)—so much so that we’re now wondering whether people might be focusing so much on a few trees that they’re forgetting to consider the forest. Allow me to explain. While AI is undeniably a sea change in computing, it ultimately represents a much broader revolution in which technology is becoming more human centric and human conscious. Essentially, technology is now learning to adapt to people, as opposed to people needing to learn and adapt to new technologies.

As part of this shift, technology is expanding not only its cognitive abilities but also its sensory, social, and ethical capabilities. Within the expansion of technology’s sensory abilities, we’re seeing advancements and growth in spatial computing. Spatial context and movement within three-dimensional spaces are core human-sensory abilities, and thus, likely new growth areas in humanizing machine interactions. Spatial computing has emerged as one of the most compelling paradigms that are melding with AI—so compelling that we can consider it the third wave of interactions in personal computing. Read More

Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) has inspired action on many fronts! It seems that virtually every organization with a technology product has jumped on board and added assistive intelligence to their product. In the first half of 2023, investors have poured $14.1 billion into generative AI companies, across 86 deals. [1] AI, in general, is big business. According to Failory, there were 126 AI unicorn companies globally as of August 2023. [2] The industry domains receiving the most Gen AI investment include transportation, science and engineering, cyber security, health and wellness, and sales and marketing. Even the education, retail, agriculture, and sustainability marketplaces have received funding.

The Gen AI race is on! Because of the widespread zeal for the adoption of Gen AI, many companies have rushed new products and functionality to market—often without answering essential questions such as the following:

• How can we ensure that Gen AI augments workers rather than replaces them?
• How can we ensure that we train AI on accurate, unbiased data?
• How can companies and individuals protect data privacy—especially for sensitive data such as healthcare or financial information—once products have become ubiquitous in virtually every interaction and transaction. Read More