Emerging technology creates perplexing problems for user-centered design, such as: how do you take a user-centered approach when it’s too early to have a defined user? Does this mean you should throw out user-centered design, or choose your target user based solely on TAM?
Read More
Last week I conducted in-person interviews with a high-risk participant pool. Normally I would have worn an N95 mask, but at least 1/3 of our participants also had moderate to severe hearing loss. So instead, I wore a transparent face mask to ensure we’d still be able to communicate. Here's what worked and what didn't.
Read More
Observing how different generations interact with technology can be a surprisingly successful strategy for discovering new users to serve. In tech, we often have a blind spot when it comes to designing for users older or younger than ourselves. But broadening our perspective can reveal new opportunities for creating not just business value, but also meaningful changes in people’s lives.
Read More
With all the hype around AI, it’s hard to recognize what issues are attention-worthy. So last week’s Rosenfeld Media community workshop on AI was a valuable opportunity to see what questions are top-of-mind for the UX community.
Read More
AI is a technology with rippling systems-level effects. Collaborating across diverse disciplines is the only way to begin to understand the full implications of our AI design decisions. This is the focus of an upcoming community workshop I'll be moderating on artificial intelligence.
Read More
In Rosenfeld Media’s upcoming Advancing Research community workshop on artificial intelligence, I’ll be talking with Rachael Dietkus, Nishanshi Shukla, and David Womack about what researchers and tech professionals can do to mitigate issues in AI tool use, from psychological harm to users, to damaging our knowledge bases.
Read More
Friction is the #1 killer of research repositories. I recently spoke with insurance technology company Guidewire about strategies for keeping friction low and ensuring that research repositories provide enduring value for researchers and research consumers alike.
Read More
Analysts argue we’re entering the “Trough of Disillusionment” for AI. That may be bad news for investors, but for product teams, it offers new opportunities to build products that solve more meaningful problems for their users.
Read More
Video data and person detection are important for a growing number of IoT/smart device applications, but many existing approaches require raw video to be transmitted into the cloud before biometric features can be redacted. Iravantchi et al. have found a new way to redact humans from videos before any video data is uploaded, or even stored on the device itself.
Read More
A lot of my work focuses on helping emerging technology teams find product/market fit. But this can be important for teams innovating with established technologies as well. There are three common situations where the need to find a new market arises: slumping sales, realizing your existing market is too small, and designing for emerging technologies.
Read More
Startup Archetype AI is fusing physical sensor data with LLMs to create an AI model that will "encode the entire physical world." This approach means that natural language becomes a translation layer used to both interpret input (i.e., sensing) and to issue commands (e.g., controlling a robot arm). This work is exciting but also hard to access. What can a regular person do to start experimenting with and preparing for this type of tech?
Read More
In the US, thanks to Apple, “spatial computing” has become synonymous with “augmented reality.” This is not so in other parts of the world; nor does “spatial computing” only encompass future-state tech.
Read More
An article in this month’s issue of The Fabricator underscores that physical industry workers are not experiencing the same AI boom as information workers. Are we so accustomed to designing for information workers that we’re overlooking opportunities to serve new audiences?
Read More
Aman Ibrahim created TerifAI (as in “terrify”), a bot that can clone your voice after only a minute or so of conversation. It’s an incredible demonstration of the rapid development (and growing threat) of voice cloning AI, and an example of why the need for biometric voice redaction is becoming more urgent.
Read More
Emerging tech teams may build a product thinking there’s a market, only to be forced to pivot when sales slump. A human-centered technical exploration can be a starting point for discovering new markets. I helped a consumer robotics team create user-centered “razors” to identify new target customers, despite tight timelines and lack of access to prototypes or production models.
Read More
As part of a recent biometric data redaction demo, we used ElevenLabs to replace the voices of participants in recordings with AI-generated speech. Now ElevenLabs has announced new voice models based on classic actors. This raises new questions about trade-offs between participant privacy and stakeholder perceptions.
Read More
Just because you’re not seeing widespread consumer adoption yet doesn’t mean that spatial computing is languishing! Augmented reality is clearly following the “industry-first” trend we saw with Internet of Things and smart devices.
Read More