How UX researchers can partner with (and not be replaced by) AI [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series](Videoconference)
Four of your research colleagues discussed and defended their respective positions (below) on the impact of AI on user research. Participants engaged in a discussion and Q&A, facilitated by Dr. Jamika D. Burge.
“AI has the potential to be the researcher’s best friend, by doing all the heavy lifting associated with analysis – but it also has the potential to cause unimaginable damage”.
– Nick Fine
“Researchers absolutely must learn to create AI prompts. Not only will prompt engineering become an essential, required research skill, but it will also offer a much-needed opportunity to rethink our role as facilitators of change.”
– Alexandra Jayeun Lee
Soon, AI will be able to utilize the participant’s feedback as a prompt to create RITE design variations on the fly, offering the researcher multiple flow options organically and in real time, which will radically transform our research practice.”
– Greg Nudelman
“UX Researchers can reinvent themselves as “delightful ethicists” who oversee ethics on critical issues when generative AI supplies abundant solutions without providing the why.”
– Bo Wang
What UX research maturity looks like and how we get there [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series] (Videoconference)
Three of your research colleagues discussed and defended their respective positions on what UX research “maturity” looks like. Participants then engaged with them in a discussion and Q&A, facilitated by Lada Gorlenko.
“Absent a strong baseline level of data fluency, product teams struggle to harness the power of insight in their work. As UX and UXR leaders, we are uniquely positioned to define what fluency looks like for our organizations and help teams transform to achieve it.”
– Megan Blocker
“Research has come a long way, but we have a long way to go. Our future success rests on two pivotal aspects of maturity: our leadership’s proximity to power and the use of ‘Strategic Research Programs’ to deliver value beyond Design and Product.“
– Fatimah Richmond
“Does UX maturity matter in the age of Generative AI? Is your ability to do well as a team going to depend on your UX skills? Or your tech or people skills?”
– Molly Stevens
Panel Discussion: Communicating the Value of DesignOps
Closing Comments
After a very full day of expanding our minds, we’ve reached the end – of the program, that is. We’ll take a moment to reflect and hear some closing words of wisdom from Christian.
COMMUNICATE: Discussion
Ren Pope on Ontology in the Digital Age
Ren Pope has a passion for all things data, information, and knowledge, and he strives to make them more accessible, organized, and enduring. You may be surprised that this conversation about information architecture takes us back to classic Greek philosophy, specifically ontology, which is concerned with the nature of being—that is, what is real and not real.
What is inside a computer cannot be seen, yet it is real in the sense that it has value and can impact reality. And as a modern ontologist, Ren wants to make information accessible and useful. That often starts with assigning names to things—nouns and verbs to label the functions of an organization so that things can be indexed, searched, retrieved, crosslinked, and so that relationships can be defined through metadata.
It’s a complicated process for small businesses and consultants, and the challenges rise exponentially for enterprises with multiple departments and silos.
With 60 years of shared experience, Ren and Lou remember when companies were dependent on Excel Spreadsheets and PowerPoint to manage the complexities of a living and evolving organization (many still are!). Today there are multiple options for organizing both structured and unstructured data, and thanks to ontologists like Ren, the tools are getting better.
Lou and Ren’s discussion spans from the philosophical to the practical. Ren shares some concrete ways to use ontological thinking in your everyday work:
• Find all the nouns and verbs your organization uses to describe its functions.
• Define what you are trying to accomplish.
• Focus your scope. The narrower the domain, or the more specific the task, the easier your task will be. If you don’t have a narrow, well-defined scope, you will probably over-collect data.
• Find how the nouns and verbs interact.
• Have a method for maintaining your data.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
• About classic ontology and how it relates to the digital age
• How information architecture has evolved over the last 30 years
• What is ontological thinking and how to incorporate it into your work
• The relationship between information architects, engineers, and the end user
• About the upcoming Enterprise UX Conference in June
Quick Reference Guide
• [0:00:58] Introduction of Ren Pope
• [0:02:17] Ontologist vs information architect vs interactive designer vs knowledge manager
• [0:06:00] Ontology within organizations and particular challenges for enterprises
• [0:09:50] Metadata for structured and unstructured data
• [0:14:01] LLM summaries, single metadata terms, abstracts, summaries – they all have their place and all can work together
• [0:18:50] How normal people can benefit from ontology or better IA at an enterprise level
• [0:23:28] Data needs to be captured, managed, and represented
• [0:27:41] A glimpse of the back-in-the-day solutions, like Excel Spreadsheets and PowerPoint, and how far we’ve come
• [0:29:40] The scale of volume and complexity of the enterprise environment keeps growing. Is technology keeping up?
• [0:35:08] Ren’s gift to the audience – Mettle Health
Unique challenges of innovation in enterprises (Videoconference)
So many companies want to innovate in order to find new business models. But what happens when your company already has a business model? How do you disrupt your business model without destroying your business? Why would you even bother? Innovating inside an already successful company requires a new set of tools for overcoming internal resistance, not losing your current customer base, and knowing when to give up existing revenue streams. In this talk, Laura Klein, author of “Build Better Products” and “UX for Lean Startups” shares some tips for companies who want to find new business models before the old ones stop working.
The Lens of Language: authors Andy Welfle and Michael J. Metts on why Writing Is Designing
Michael Metts and Andy Welfle, authors of the new Rosenfeld Media book Writing Is Designing, get meta and discuss writing about UX writing with Lou Rosenfeld. They also stress the importance of looking through the “lens of language,” when solving problems – reworking your existing language to make things clear from the outset, rather than fixing problems by adding more copy later. Their book will help those responsible for digital copy communicate more effectively—from designers to marketers who might never have considered themselves “UX people.”
Andy Welfle and Michael J. Metts are the co-authors of the upcoming Rosenfeld Media title, Writing Is Designing, available January 14, 2020.
How Creativity can Help Remote Teams Collaborate with Denise Jacobs
We’re bringing Creativity Evangelist Denise Jacobs to our virtual workshop lineup this year! Here, she chats with Lou about how the current era of “doom-scrolling” means it’s more important than ever to unlock our creative minds and make meaningful connections.
One challenge of working remotely is the loss of a sense of personal connection. Having tools that allow you to collaborate in a virtual environment and overcome isolation is a way to expand the collective creativity of the whole team.
Her workshop is an opportunity to expand your knowledge base, skill set, and be inspired by creativity and collaboration using new and different tools to figure out how to add extra life to the work-from-home environment.
Denise’s three day workshop this February (10 hours over 3 segments: February 2-4, 2021) will focus on leveraging collective brilliance, becoming confident in sharing your ideas, and learning to be an excellent listener. Next comes “the fun part” — how to use improvisation to make collaboration feel like a game, and not like work.
Marc Rettig and Lou Rosenfeld discuss how designers can help reshape organizational culture
Well-crafted UX depends on having a company culture that’s set up to design well. Can you influence the culture of your company? Yes. Marc and Lou discuss three unique approaches to culture change happening in corporations like IBM and Citrix today. This is a preview into a panel Marc will lead on Designing Organizational Culture at Enterprise UX in San Antonio (May 13-15).
