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AI has a UX problem
AI products, like most, need more user-enabled functionality and augmentation.
I wrote the majority of this article using Otter.ai and standard recorded voice memos from some preloaded app that comes on newer iPhones. This post comes out of research I’m doing for a book on design and machine learning. So much of writing this book has been a struggle, not for lack of ideas, but because of COVID. In the middle of the writing process, I became somewhat disabled, suffering from long COVID. Suddenly, all the patterns and tools and software I had come to rely on and use in one way I needed to use in a completely different and new way.
This article, and the book, are not technically on disability or inclusivity, which are important topics, but are topics I feel like I lack the experience to write about. There are plenty of other much more in-depth and fantastic books and resources you can use to learn about disability and inclusivity. But like other disabled designers, I’ve started to rely much more heavily on AI tools, particularly voice-to-text, tools, and translation tools- and this is what this article covers. AI has a UX problem, but so do most products out there. The issue here is a lack of augmentation. Products are so specific, so ‘useful’, that they are too smooth, and too narrow to allow for a wide variety of use cases, and this is a diversity and inclusivity issue. We’ve been in a generation of smooth, minimal, works-with-one-tap design, and that creates an assumption of a singular idea and a…