After spending one semester diving into all AI has to offer us as designers, I am undertaking a slight narrowing in scope. In the second semester of design and research, I want to focus my research efforts towards my professional areas of interest. As I would like to work as a UX designer following the completion of the degree program, I am very interested in how AI will, can, and is affecting UX design.
In the initial exploration of this topic, I found two talks given by usability consultant and human computer interaction researcher Jakob Nielsen. In the first, Nielsen was asked about the relationship between AI and UX, and how UX designers can get more involved with AI. Nielsen remarked first that many things are being done with AI now “just because they can [be]”, not necessarily because they are needed. According to Nielsen, this is reminiscent of chasing after the train, or trend, but the use of AI in design is only “good” if it solves a human need in a better and/or faster way. Additionally, exposure to substandard AI products can leave people with a bad impression of AI, who will then be more reluctant to use similar products in the future. For this reason, Nielsen says, it’s better to wait until an AI-integrated design feature is done well before releasing it, rather than hopping on the bandwagon. We must always ask, “What does this actually do for people?”, a sentiment Nielsen believes is lacking in many UX-AI projects.
One aspect of AI in UX that Nielsen is excited about is the possibility of AI becoming proficient at knowing what people want, vs. literally interpreting what they say. Many of us have now had the experience of asking ChatGPT to help us analyze or generate code, or have asked DallE for imagery that never turns out quite as we imagined. Currently, successful use of AI in design requires one to know exactly how to ask for what you want, but Nielsen envisions a future where AI can interpret our wants better than we can communicate them, and “do what I want, not what I say”.
What was particularly interesting to me in these two talks was Nielsen’s predictions for the future of UX work in an increasingly AI-dominated space. In great contrast to many doom and gloom “the robots will take our jobs” positions, Nielsen believes that AI will make UX designers more productive and improve the quality of our output, leading to more jobs and more good UX design being done. More output generally equals more money to be made, and the growth of the UX design field itself. Some examples of AI use in UX include using AI to transcribe user interviews, or to conduct them and analyze the results for points of interest. AI can also comb through massive amounts of data for statistics and points of interest. On the visual side, AI can produce a design draft that is then edited by the designer (we already saw this last term, with Adobe Spark). Nielsen notes that if something can be done more cheaply and easily with AI, then that’s what people will do.
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