Design + AI: what's next?
Introduction
With the rapid rise in AI growth and enablement a larger and larger set of institutions are beginning to grapple with what the now larger presence of this new "tool" means. Aside from the large scale fears and within the smaller cheers it's hard to tell where everyone will come out in it's wake.
As a designer one of the more exciting elements for me has been looking at how this tool not only means a change in the way we think about design but also in how we will go about doing design.
With more and more tools launched on what seems to be an hourly basis and an even larger set of use cases by the minute, it's becoming more and more imperative to think about how design will evolve into its next phase.
A New Persona
As we begin to plan user journeys for AI enabled experiences we need to begin to appreciate that apart from the now human user there may also need be an additional machine user as well. Journeys will have to be mapped with simple and intuitive user flows that allow both groups to be able to quickly and accurately navigate through the experience with a different set of feedback and progression for each.
Machine users will have their own set of needs and demands and models such as those used to enable the new Rabbit R1 device will begin to display their way of "viewing" our digital experiences along with their way of wasting and needing from these.
Furthermore, models will initially each require a set overall understanding of the experience before they can learn and grow from it and part of that will likely involve a form of onboarding for these models.
In this way the story of your experience will now be told to a newer set of users for whom the experience will transcend just a physical UI manifestation.
Singular Experiences
As we begin to incorporate new personas we also begin to appreciate the growing need of forming singular experiences. These would be a standard set of user patterns and interactions that would be governed by a broader design system that would allow designers to be able to ensure they are able to cross the boundaries for both user groups when creating their experiences. Examples of this would include simpler ways to give user feedback that don't just rely on micro interactions or a broader way of depicting the progression through a wizard that isn't tied to a visual stepper.
Experiences will now begin to transcend past just the UI and will likely cross over into other mediums such as voice, CLI and even data design. As the ways in which machine learning models will engage with your experience will vary there is a need to expand deign to a wider set of elements and allow these to be unified by a key set of guidelines that allow the experience to remain as true to the intention of the designers as possible.
Indicusl applications and broader web based experience will also eventually become secondary as the primary points of contact for human users as well will likely be elements such as voice or gesture commands. This means that there will be a layer above what designers currently create that will act as a point of access to these experiences. The most relatable way to think about this is that abuser may have Uber installed on their device but they will now no longer need just the device to hail a ride as they could simply issue a command on their IoT device, mobile device, public access device or other and it would automatically through voice recognition authenticate and through AI connect them to their attached service provider (Uber).
This new pathway for users to interact and the other pathways that machine learning models will interact with means that there will be a need to align experiences more and more and designers and design system engineers will face a growing challenge to standardize these.
Design workflow
As the complexity of what designers will work on grows the overall workflow for a designer will also need to adapt.
Design requirements will now be tenfold and that means that designers themselves may need to begin finding and enabling themselves using AI powered tooling in order to begin to manage this scope.
Incorporating more AI tooling within their workflow has the added benefit of also educating designers on the new users they will now be creating for. This almost symbiotic relationship will yield a wider understanding of how to grow AI for experiences and places designers in an critical role for helping develop and bridge the gap between business and AI.
Research methodologies and workshops will now likely be more crucial than before as there will be a need to examine experience more intrinsically both for functionality but also for responsibility. Designers will have an added onus of ensuring that as wide a set of users not only have access to functioning experiences but also experiences that do not lose a threat of insult of exclusion. This will mean examining data that is used to train models as well as verting model behavior and interaction within the enabled experience to ensure the most inclusive of spaces is being developed
Conclusion
AI is not going to be leaving us and has been evolving with us over the last few years. The rapid growth we're seeing how will likely change but that doesn't negate its presence. This means that denying what it will do to and for us as designers would be fundamentally flawed. Instead embracing and growing and understanding as well as acting as the cohesive counterpoint for it will position designers inna more valuable space within institutions and
make them a pivotal part of what's next.