108 / The Human Reality of User Experience, with Aaron Usiskin

Product Momentum Podcast

The recent acceleration of artificial intelligence into the product + design space may spark more answers than questions. But the questions that persist are big ones. In this episode of Product Momentum, Aaron Usiskin, Director of UX/UI Enterprise Incubation and Enablement at Zelis, explores this philosophical head-scratcher: with AI/ML, are we at risk of losing the humanity from our human-centered design practice?

Aaron guides host Paul Gebel and guest co-host Brian Loughner, a Lead UX Designer at ITX, through his multi-level response.

“There are so many ways that AI and ML have already streamlined our process as designers and UXers,” Aaron says, “that we shouldn’t step away from it. We really should embrace it even more than we do today.”

At the same time, he concedes, “AI is based only on the things that people have done on a website or a mobile app. Plus, it’s really hard to understand how one person or a group of people are going to use your system, regardless of how much research or AI you do.

“If you really want to understand people, you have to be among them. You have to be learning with them, interacting with them, communicating with them, interviewing them. And when you’re interviewing them, it’s not writing down their answers. It’s looking into their eyes, understanding the facial recognition of what they’re doing.”

There’s no AI that’s going to be able to tell you if someone’s paying attention, he adds. “I don’t think it’s ever going to take away the humanistic factor of design out of it.”

We’re looking to a future that combines the power of AI with the fundamentals of human-centered design. Thank goodness; that sounds like a winning combination.

Be sure to catch the entire conversation with Aaron Usiskin: learn how to apply AI/ML to streamline the design process – but only after you have the fundamentals of user experience in place.

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Join Jesse James Garrett, Rich Mironov, and Radhika Dutt at ITX’s Product + Design Conference, June 22-23 in Rochester, NY. Final 3 speakers to be announced soon. Learn more.

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