An unlikely parallel between user-centred design and AI..for now

Hello from very cold Bath! I've been using AI every day for personal and professional reasons, at the moment, it's helping me as a peer to sense-check ideas and to hold me accountable to the high standards I set for myself and the work I produce for my clients.

In using it, I've noticed some unlikely parallels between user-centred design and AI. On one hand, user-centred design relies on empathy to create solutions that solve real problems. On the other, generative AI is a powerful technology solving problems on a scale never seen before, but it's faceless and seemingly very disconnected from the humanistic practices of user-centred design.

As I use AI daily, I’m beginning to see the unexpected ways AI and user-centred design overlap in their purpose and outcomes. How are AI interfaces and user-centred design aligned in providing relevant, accessible, and meaningful information to users?

Disclaimer: In trying to avoid using generic pictures of code on laptops to depict AI, I've gone to town with imaginative pictures from Unsplash, enjoy that!

Democratising information

Just like user-centred design simplifies access to information and aligns the experience to the need or intent of the user, I've seen how the interfaces of generative AI tools like ChatGPT simplifies and speeds up the search process by easily surfacing highly relevant knowledge to make informed decisions.

Similarly, user-centred design aims to democratise information by reducing the time it takes a user to find valuable content, and in content design, we've talked extensively about prioritising content around user intent. But this has created conflict particularly as we're at the mercy of Google and it's ever-changing rule book on SEO. Have you noticed that even the most SEO-optimised pages, for example, the landing pages on 'Top 10 vacuum cleaners of 2024' aren't really that helpful? Yes they're ranked high on search, their page is completely optimised for SEO, but it fails to add actual value. Competing priorities, whether they're SEO priorities or commercial priorities, have often come at a cost to the audience, so I'm welcoming the role that AI can play in helping to cut through this noise.

We can understand the impact that AI is having by looking back at the beloved and well-known marketing funnel, much like user-centred design would help the search and buy process, AI is literally achieving the same outcome but at a much faster rate, I'll tell you how.

Let's say you want to know which countries are hot in September for a holiday, historically you'd be on the discovery stage of the search looking at average temperatures of Spain or Germany. Now, you can use AI to act as a travel agent, spoon-feeding specific requirements around holiday destinations with a flight time of less than 2 hours, with family-friendly activities and a hotel by the beach. It cuts through the endless toggling, filtering, searching and cookie banners to help you move to the conversion stage faster than ever before.

Reducing cognitive load

Just like user-centred design teams do much of the leg work in reducing the cognitive load for users, the clean interface of AI platforms also cut through the noise of cookie banners, targeted advertising and sub-optimal user interfaces to provide the core information which is empowering.

This makes me think a lot about the future of website design when we are now given so much information without going anywhere near a single website. I'm also very aware about the plans that AI tools like Perplexity have, which is to introduce paid-for opportunities to present follow-up questions for certain organisations to share their product or service. So the cleanliness of these interfaces may not be forever, but for now, it works.

Personalised results

By reducing cognitive load, personalisation is a powerful tool in user-centred design but it's also integral to the uses of AI too. Using personas to give segmented audiences a more personalised experience is a time-consuming task, when the personas are created they remain static, whereas AI has the potential to create more dynamic personas which change based on the evolving behavioural trends of the user.

The power of AI to analyse large data sets of historic behaviour, research the latest market trends and learning from customer interactions over time will easily out-rival the limited resources from marketing teams who aren't using AI.

Which is why it's so important for marketing teams, user-centred designers and researchers to be working alongside these powerful tools.

It can help with:

• understanding the quality of information used, checking that the data points are actually key data points to get better online experiences.
• checking that the market research conducted by the AI machine is relevant to the audience who you may speak to day in and day out.

If you're entirely new to AI, that's OK, it's mostly just about playing around with and leaning into the curiosity about little jobs it can help you with. If you want more advice on this, let me know in the comments!

A need for transparency, trust and ethics

Just like unconscious bias infiltrates into user-centred design, even with best efforts to standardise and check for bias, it can't always be guaranteed, especially when product teams are up against big deadlines to ship a product.

I like the idea that AI can be trained around good standards, inclusive, bias-free content, there is still the challenge of understanding who is the person training up the AI and what principles, language and guidelines are they using to train up the AI. Also in terms of the way the AI model has been built, the way it prioritises and curates information could be incorporating knowledge from data sources which have been affected by bias. On both accounts, we should all continue to hold ourselves accountable in delivering experiences that are seamless for all.

A strong product, and an even better brand

This has also got me thinking about the future of website design and development, if AI really is going to transform the way we search and convert. If anything, it simplifies the way we should be looking at marketing: an excellent product and an even better brand. A product that gets shortlisted in the AI search because of it's compelling benefits and ability to match a clear need.

A brand that houses the product so when you are moving from 'consideration' to 'conversion' the brand is powerful enough to stand out, with personality that connects and resonates with you.

Over to you

I'd love to hear from you, how you're using AI and if you've noticed other parallels or actually some really big differences. Let me know in the comments.