Rethinking how we UX: Using AI to bring users what they need, when they need it.

In the spirit of continuous learning I‘ve been attending AI meetups in SF, meeting founders and developers, learning about all-the-use-cases beyond the ones we’ve uncovered as a design team in healthcare.

The current flavor of Human-AI Interaction is in this awkward pre-teen chatbot phase, added as a modal alongside other modals, their shiney new input fields like braces sparkling atop of the collaborative mess teams have been toiling on for years.

I believe their is a promise of using Machine Learning and AI beyond a chat interface. Perhaps to fix disparate data sources due to a lack of system interoperability, too many apps, too many websites, too much interface and a deluge of DATA.

There exists a real opportunity to reflect on the business choices we’ve made to guide users towards an experience that has since evolved into an over built series of questionable intentions.

All the searching, clicking, tapping, scrolling, panning, zooming, opening and closing—could be replaced by machine learning: nlp, ocr and yes even something intelligent-like: a smart invisible assistant that pushes all the buttons for us. Or something really well-designed.

Imagine providing what your user needs by just providing them the insight, information, action at the right time. Only what matters.

That may mean not building a tedious 40+ screen workflow in 7 responsive layouts, modeled with 50 components each with multiple variants/variables/tokens. All of us hoping users will get what they need by following the intricate path the team painstakingly planned and paved. Nor is it an input-chat-field hovering above the users workflow.

I encourage teams to think about how to automate redundant tasks (not just document them in a workflow using our traditional UI methods). Gather and use the data from research to sketch a “smart” version alongside the albeit longer traditional UI way… and SELL IT as a stratigic optimized option.

If we don’t, we’ll be using AI to band-aid the mess we made with an endless trail of UI, informed by the interface-y manual way of making humans do-all-the-screen-things at the expense of everyone’s sanity.

I began my Product Design journey as a creator of custom Design Systems (when we called them Visual Language Systems) so this sounds sorta scary to dedicated Visual Designers and Interaction Designers… AND this is the future value we bring to users and the business.

Instead of a super-pumped chatbot hovering above all the options… maybe it’s a real pretty outcome informed by your AI-optimized worklow?

Wouldn’t that be nice.