Column: Conscious Experience Design

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

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 artificial-intelligence (AI) technology advances, traditional user-experience methods must adapt to effectively address the dynamic and relational nature of new autonomous agents. The state of user interfaces has shifted dramatically from interactive systems with fixed, finite states to adaptive AI agents that are capable of flexible, even infinite interactions. Today’s AI-powered user interfaces don’t just respond to commands, they adapt, learn, and interact in ways that mimic human conversations and interactions.

As AI agents evolve to exhibit open-ended interactions, prototyping becomes crucial for UX designers to truly understand and effectively test these dynamic systems—going far beyond the requirements of traditional user-interface design. In this new era of the design of autonomous-agent experiences, UX designers need to more frequently and rapidly prototype throughout the design process and strengthen their skills in computational design to achieve optimal success. Read More