What makes a great artificial intelligence (AI) driven user experience? Here are my thoughts…
1. Design AI services end to end – the disruptors that have transformed the travel, holiday and retail sectors over the last twenty years succeeded by aggressively focusing on continually improving their own single channel online experience. AI user experience design must also adopt this strict one channel approach to service delivery – every user journey should be simple, relevant, no fuss and always getting better because its being delivered by an artificial intelligence end to end.
2. Go beyond mobile – The interconnectivity of AI enables any environment or physical object to positively affect all of our five senses (such as connected home technology like heating and lighting devices that responds to a user’s mood). AI design should always be pushing to transcend the user interface constraints of existing service platforms (particularly the visual and audio experience of mobile) to truly reflect and improve how we use our senses to interact with the world around us.
3. Addressable media is a key user journey – AI has the potential to utilise a complex range of historic and contextual customer data to deliver targeted, personalised advertising (UK broadcasters are adopting programmatic technology to deliver specific adverts at individual households in real time for example). Yet if designed poorly such disruptive engagement risks coming across like hard selling that overwhelms or irritates a customer (consider the negative reaction of customers to pop ad web ads that apply a similar approach). Consequently, it’s vital that AI driven addressable media is treated as a form of user experience that requires research, design and testing to ensure customers are empowered to consume it on their own terms.
4. Hardwire ethics and sustainability – the positive disruption to our lives from social media has enabled these services to grow rapidly and organically by billions of users worldwide. Yet this has also led to these platforms becoming so big it’s challenging for their service providers to effectively manage and safeguard the user content they share. Drawing from this experience, and combined with public calls for the proactive regulation of AI, it’s essential artificial intelligence products and services have the right ethics and sustainability values in their core design as they are likely to grow even faster and bigger than social media.
5. Champion “AI Neutrality” – artificial intelligence has the power to transform all our lives like the internet before it. A fundamental principle driving the success of the web has been “net neutrality” – that internet data services should be supplied as a form of utility (like electricity, gas, water) in a non-discriminatory way to all customers. Access to simple AI services should be similarly “neutral” – a basic human right that is complemented by differentiated, chargeable products and services from over-the-top producers.
