What is the Future of UX Design?
By: Sridhar Dhulipala
Tags: Automation, Technology And Design, User Experience, Careers, Future Of Ux

Postscript:

And this about AI impact on UX Design has been discussed a lot. So has the example of The Grid, who I refer to as a Clayton Christensen disruptive entrant. In some ways, The Grid is the hero (like the mini steel plants and mini computers.) Here is one great piece from UX Collective by Fabricio Teixeira — “How AI has started to impact our work as designers.” Fabricio is bang on about the impact of AI and that its well-suited to do the chores like cropping images, maybe sort and tag images. However, I believe this is the sort of productivity we will see in the short term, not wholesale, but in those large agencies with large stable accounts and steady budget flows. My point is that in the longer term, as technologies mature, they will be capable of doing good design maybe with 1000x more iterations, A/B test, iterate again and publish widely. During the early days of WWW, we had designers hand crafting attractive banner ads. In the future, these may just be the output of an AI driven ad serving platform that creates a campaign, negotiates and buys spots, runs the campaign, learns from it and repeats. Of course, the path to that has its trials and tribulations like Microsoft’s Tay! These are those patchy early version prototypes that will eventually disrupt.

Instead, UX professionals in future neednt be limited to UX or the stuff above line of visibility, which machines may replace. They ought to work closely with Product Managers and Engineers to re imagine product experiences.

For example let us consider the common, abstract five star rating feedback method. This UX is a legacy of OLTP (transaction) systems in its thinking. Feedback is captured in a manner that suits how its processed, which is rule based, rigid. Go with me and imagine how this feedback mechanism overhauled assuming the rigid rules are replaced by self learning AI systems.

Concept for an AI based feedback system where FEEDBACK is a RELATIONSHIP and not a TRANSACTION.

What if AI inverts the feedback from an explicit, overt system to an implicit covert approach, wherein, AI system observes and learns user relationship with products or services in a context that it determines as appropriate, to capture the feedback as a continuous ‘relationship’ with the product/service as against a ‘transaction’ with the product. This image is only a conceptual illustration wherein Feedback = relationship is constructed and changes with time. There can be an aggregate view or the splits to drill down. User has control on which view or all views to share. This is an example of how UXers can question the norm and reimagine the product to address power of new technologies, while allowing the same system to focus on the chores of generating ‘designs’ for UXer to choose from. In that sense, future of UX Designer would be part curator, part designer. The distinction between what a designer does and AI does is likely to be between rich organic memories (human) and artificial rules/graphs (AI). Those memories will be our strength and guide our hand and eye.

As you leave, read this brilliant piece by Mariana Lin on the distinction between an artificial persona and a human persona.

Caveat: I admit to overly optimistic and exuberant assessment here and this is an area of speculation. I am informed by my own 7 year journey as a designer co-founder at a Hadoop based big data startup (see - ramblings from a failed startup journey )