Column: Envisioning New Horizons

The latest Accenture consumer report provides an emblematic summary of our huge expectations around generative artificial intelligence (AI), as follows:

“Generative AI is upgrading the Internet from informative to intelligent, and the experience of using it from transactional to personal.”

There is no denying that a shift toward AI applications is really happening. The seductive power of language is leading online users to interact with digital media in new ways. AI-powered conversational interfaces are spearheading a behavioral change that is poised to transform user experiences on the Web. Read More

My mum decided that we had to fill out our family’s income-tax returns online, on the Tax Agency’s Web site, and from that moment on, my dad had to confront the daunting practicalities of obtaining his own digital identity. This entailed his making a Web call to a service provider to get his identity verified by a human agent. Seeing my dad struggling with this unknown medium, engaging in a type of interaction that felt completely cringey to him, was touching and somehow a bit funny, too. It struck me that he just couldn’t make himself look at the person on the screen. Instead, he invariably turned around to look at me, where I was standing silent and out of view—given the legal requirements of the online verification—but ready to provide assistance during the procedure.

To be fair, my eighty-year-old dad is quite comfortable tinkering with his smartphone and proficient in carrying out the tasks that matter to him—for example, texting his loved ones, looking up information online, or perusing a Web shop. However, other tasks that are novel for him often come with unexpected hurdles and the risk of failure. A case in point: his identity verification failed. Read More

Just a few years ago, UX professionals weren’t talking about topics such as user privacy, technological governance, cybersecurity, or sustainable information technology (IT) as much as we are now. We have come to an inflection point in the history of the Web and are now seeing some unintended implications of the digital innovations that have bubbled up on the Internet—from online fraud to mental-health issues to unsustainable consumerism. However, the ways in which we, as UX professionals, do our work has not yet caught up with these issues.

As I touched upon in a previous column, UX design practices still hinge upon principles that maximize productivity, efficiency, and cognitive ease, in ways that are fundamentally at odds with some of the priorities and values that are emerging today. The formalization of these principles is grounded in the notion of user-centered design (UCD), a paradigm that gained steam at the onset of the Internet era, in the late ’90s. [1]

If people’s attitudes toward and needs for digital experiences are shifting, why are we still using the same UX design methods that made sense for the burgeoning Web? Read More