We and AI
By: Richard Harris
Tags: AI, UX

DEFINE: Identifying a persona, their problem and possible solutions

Hello Paul, tell me a bit about yourself!

We quickly realised that the majority of our respondents were white, used social media for sharing information with family and friends, and indicated a desire to make a difference when they saw or experienced injustice. With this in mind, we created Paul. He is a strong believer in social justice and doing what he feels is right, but only when he has access to clear and balanced information.

We now considered why Paul would want to know more about racial bias in AI. As a white man, research had suggested that he is in the group least likely to be affected by bias in AI, but from a number of the non-white respondents, we know they’d been affected by AI biases. So, Paul was concerned and wanted to raise awareness of the issue he and a black colleague had when using the automatic passport gates at immigration on returning to the UK. He had no problems, but they got rejected and had to be manually checked. As this had happened before, he wanted to research if this was a wider issue, which we captured in an experience map, identifying his pain-points.

Paul’s Experience Map

To provide a bit more on Paul and his motivations, we created his empathy map to help us get into his mindset we considered the problem.

Paul’s Empathy Map

Paul has a problem…

With insight from the research distilled into Paul, we identified a problem statement:

Paul needs a way to easily find enough, clear and unbiased resources on AI

because he wants to make a difference by raising awareness of these issues though sharing information through social media, as existing sites don’t provide this.

Then to further visualise this, we captured the following outcome with a storyboard.

Paul’s Outcome Statement and Storyboard

This, in turn, led to the creation of Paul’s user flow. We now had the base foundations to start the creative process of considering how we could solve the problem.

Paul’s User Flow

So, how could the flow work on the existing site?

The existing site was created to help launch We and AI, and while it serves its purpose, we considered how the new ‘toolkit’ and ‘resources’ features could be added and where it should sit in the new site.

So, we proposed the following restructure:

As the toolkit and resources are going to be the core offering, it should be upfront.

The ‘News’ menu item was seen as dynamic and a further draw, so it was promoted from being a blog at the end of the top-level menu.

The information from resources and the dynamic news, it followed that ‘Get Involved’ would be the next step for potential volunteers.

Proposed Application Map with the two new menu entries

So, How Might We solve this problem?

To ensure the client was engaged and to validate our work, we ran a 2-hour design studio session over Zoom with them. This provided the opportunity to update them on our initial findings at the end of the first week, and to get them to start helping us to identify possible solutions using the ‘How Might We’ technique.

The facilitated design studio started with a fun warm-up exercise where everyone shared their work on the Miro platform — who knew we could all draw random animals?! This got us into the creative frame of mind for tackling two questions:

How Might We present resources in a tool?

present resources in a tool? How Might We make We and AI’s online presence more engaging?

The Design Studio ideas, sketching and dot votes

I quickly discovered the importance of giving unambiguous instructions (a lesson for next time) as in both rounds we had a mixture of images and Post It note lists! Fortunately, the situation was recovered as we got each person to explain their thoughts and common themes and ideas began to be distilled. This was further helped when each person was given some virtual sticky dots to put on their favourite ideas. The key concepts were:

Design Studio: Key Insights and Concepts

What should we focus on? Let’s prioritise!

With these concepts and with the brief firmly in mind, and mindful of focusing on essential features and keeping the costs to develop low, we identified the core features to include in the design phase.