User Experience Design and the Changes AI Will Bring

By Brad Heidemann

There is a great book called The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. It’s a bit dated in places, but the principals for designing user experiences and how they operate are very well articulated in this book. When we build a user interface, it needs to be able to operate the technology, look beautiful if possible, and the human mind must be able to create a mental model for how the technology works.

For example, steering wheels in cars have been stylized in many ways but they are all basically the same user experience. They adequately and intuitively allow you to drive your car. If it works, even though the underlying technology may change, the paradigm will persist. Just think about all the different types of cars and technology advancements over the last 100 years, yet we still have steering wheels. I can give countless additional examples, but I’d highly recommend you read the book when you have a chance.

This brings us to the question: when does user experience design change? It changes when the underlying technology is so fundamentally different or novel that the current design paradigm no longer allows consumers to operate the technology effectively. User experience changes are rare and usually a precursor to an economic wave. The graphical user interface, the web, the transition to smart phones, and video game consoles are a few examples. Total up the number of devices and people that are going to be affected and you have a measure of how big the economic wave will be.

AI is going to affect how we design and build almost every digital user experience. We currently get information four ways on the web; through a search bar, a webpage, a mobile application, or a speech recognition solution. They all rely on a query and response paradigm for the exchange of information. AI based digital experiences will be different, in that they will be a curated feed of experience and information. Meaning both the user experience and content will be dynamically generated or recalled and presented to you. Using machine learning models, the presentation of different UX elements and content recommendations will become more and more accurate over time, anticipating your needs, your moods, your contexts, and your level of understanding. Like a good friend, AI will adhere to the principles underpinning human-to-human conversation.

I want to highlight that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit, but the first thing to address should be removing static navigational menus from webpages. The navigation should be dynamically generated and ordered topically so that it is relevant, personalized, and contextually appropriate for each segmentation visiting a website. Are you there to look for a job, are you researching a product, or are you trying to buy something? Websites will become very smart at giving you what you’re looking for and maybe selling you something that you weren’t looking for. Dynamic menus will re-organize content, change colors, change styles, change tone, to attract your attention and ensure the best possible user experience. That is just one example of a near-term change.

We need to start thinking through the consequences, the opportunity, and the importance of designing new user interfaces for AI driven digital experiences. I have a passion for weaving cinematic design paradigms into web and application UX designs and I feel even stronger about it now. Cinematic design allows us to create and design for multi-dimensional experiences on two-dimensional screens.

We need design patterns that can curate an aesthetic, a sentiment, a framing, storytelling, and function within our solutions. This leads to the question, "Do we need scrolling webpages anymore?" That was the best we could do with the current information architecture, allowing you to scroll through pages of content until you find the thing you care about. Users do all the work, hoping the company’s information architecture is understandable. We can do much better.

I like cinematic design because it accounts for time, space, depth, and responsiveness in design patterns. Digital experiences are going to look a lot more like video games than webpages soon. I’ve always wanted my computer file folder structure to look like a color-coded forest that I zoom around in to find things rather than the tyrannical alphabetized folder structure we have today.

The user experience will need to accommodate an AI based digital experience that reflects the basic attributes of human-to-human interaction. We are going to move from a query response model to a curated exchange model. One in which the AI will be proactively curating your experience base on ever improving recognitions of your personal patterns of behavior. AI will try anticipating your mood, your intention, and the next information exchange that you are most likely to require. It will be the realization of truly personalized customer experiences.