When experience meets technology
New technologies bring new challenges to those who design them. They create a new interaction experience which changes the way we work. How will these new technologies transform user experiences? How can designers make sure they focus on creating human-centered experiences in the face of new technologies?
It all started when I was repositioned at my company. The main brief was, we have great technology, and it’s time to go to market. I said great, what’s my role in it? Well, it’s a new technology, we are not sure what the market is.
Oh, I said, well give me something, who are the personas? What problem are we trying to solve? Who are our competitors?
These are excellent questions I was told, that is exactly what we needed to figure out.
Years have passed, and I consolidated a new approach to the traditional UX approach. Until now, the product solutions focused primarily on the technical capabilities and their services necessities. Going to market faced them with a new reality, the consumers. Focusing on needs to be twisted toward UX in order to succeed, it must add value to the customer.
A colleague from a different field once asked me, why should we find experiences for technologies? We find experiences for users; for their problems, technology is the tool.
It reminded me of the rise of instant messaging. We didn’t expect people to message each other when they could actually talk. It seemed like a waste of time and energy; we created a new experience, that in a way, contradicted our expectations and experiences based on new technology.
Working in an R&D center gave me a heads-up of what the technology is bringing to users, new technologies mean new interfaces for users, and I would like to point out a few of them:
AI- Artificial Intelligence:
The question is not whether AI will change the game for user experiences, but when it will happen. AI sounds realistic more than ever; bots or personal assistants don’t even sound futuristic. The main challenge in designing software based on AI is actually a paradox. How can you design a generic product or experience that is based on personalisation?
Designing AI products is based on best practice, we are still studying the use of these products, but they are already out there. Real-world AI products are already being used by people on a daily basis from personal assistants to self-driving cars and through predictive analytics.
We started with a rough concept, and we are improving it with the help of data coming from the users and their behavior. Today, we already have the best practices for voice design (such as personal assistants) and conversation design (like chatbots) based on a conversation that companies, using AI technology track and map. Google has completed some interesting work putting together the book People and AI Guidebook. These practices will continue to develop and be the northern star.
AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality):
If we would expand our reality or have no limits to it, new technology would come around. Data and new experiences will folate all around you, if it feels real that means it’s real (doesn’t it?). Today, VR is used more in the gaming industry since it’s considered fun and extreme experience. We are trying to break the boundaries between the entertainment area into the real world, where people actually consume the product for a reason. The line between the fun world to the real world is thin; it needs to create real value. We need to solve a problem. We can imagine it, but we are still struggling with finding a common use of this technology. Breaking new grounds with these technologies will inevitably result in new opportunities and experiences in our lives. Think about a scenario that we wouldn’t just be adding layers to our reality, such as another screen or data. It would work the other way around; we’ll shape our physical environments to match the virtual one for benefits. Science fiction? We can wait and see.
IoT- Internet of Things:
Unlike the above- mentioned, IoT has an interface that can be easily confused with “the same that we know but smaller.” However, designing a great user experience for IoT products is easier said than done. IoT systems often consist of a couple of devices, input-output data streams. Building intuitive user experience for a new app alone is challenging not to mention several applications and interfaces. One of the biggest challenges regarding user experiences tasks in IoT is minimizing the gaps between the physical world of connected devices to smoothing the experience in the system elements. IoT involves a sequence of interactions between users from a virtual system to the physical one. IoT products are more complex than a single application or a device; therefore, it’s not enough just to build a set of intuitive cross-device user flows. We want to create an experience that guides people on how to use and seamlessly integrate IoT products into their operations and everyday life. IoT systems are based on connected things, such as asset tracking, smart home & cities, industrial machinery, connected cars, etc. The user experience for such IoT products should be tightly connected to their physical design and real-life use while bringing a new experience, design, and interface to these technologies.
New technologies are bringing in addition to the fun experiences, forced moral quandary out of philosophy department and into our streets. Our experiences shape our bias and our behaviours, but our behavior is a much more complex system that is based on a large range of reasons, one of them is a moral pattern.
Let’s take for example a scenario wherein the near- distant future we have a mixture of new technologies, combining IoT, 5G, AI, and machine to machine technology to an experiment that might get real. The scenario; We are entering the age of self-driving cars, autonomous cars. Autonomous is only one parameter of the car, but It’s actually a supercomputer on wheels.
Now imagine that the self-driving car is approaching a group of people that are crossing the road, and the only way to save them is to move out of the way. One problem, by moving out of the way, that move would run the car into a wall and kill the one passenger in the car. Of course, this scenario must be calculated in advance, so what should the car be programmed to do? Save the group of people or save the one person in the car? One vs. group.
If you ask most people this question as a theory question, I think most people would say, kill the one person and save the group. Wouldn’t you? However, the answer is more complex than only this one question. Forget the theory, let’s go to market, would you actually buy a car that is programmed to kill you? This is my machine; this is an AI product; it can’t kill the owner.
Suddenly this is a real-world question.
Let’s add some other layers just to complicate things, what if the car can actually calculate whom to save in real-time? It can calculate a group over an individual or a boy over an old man, healthy over ill, VIP over a homeless person. Moving a couple of years later, add the network layer, imagine a scenario where cars are getting to a decision point, and they are confirming whom do you have in your car vs. whom do I have in my car? I have a bus full of kids, and you have an old man with cancer. Saving one person over another would be kind of privileged what brings us back to the need for new rules that define morality worldwide. Bill Ford Joiner said (Ford company, October 2016) “no one company is going to solve that. Can you imagine if we would have one algorithm and Toyota had another and GM would have another?”. This explores the potential issues surrounding human needs raised by mobility, autonomy, trust, and accessibility.
So what’s the experience we are actually looking for? How can designers make sure they focus on creating human-centered experiences in the face of new technologies?
We should make sure we’re leveraging computers to create a new experience, not serving them.
According to Gartner, 89% of companies will be competing on the basis of customer experience. They also predict that by 2020, two billion devices will have zero-touch UIs available.
New technologies are exciting but will fall short if they don’t address human needs and enhance a user’s experience. In order to do that, We’ll need to get the technology out first and see how they would interact and how we would interact with them, this means continuously learning and understanding new technologies and contexts when designing for people. Designers will need to rethink and create new mental models for future human-machine interactions. In addition, there’s an increasing need to take into account wider social and ethical considerations when designing user experiences.
To designers that are confused by the changing requirements I can only say; smile, you just got promoted from solving problems to shaping the future :)
