This design focused series publishes books aimed at helping Designers, Design Researchers, Developers, and Storytellers understand what’s happening on the leading edge of creativity. Today’s designers are being asked to invent new paradigms and approaches every day – they need the freshest thinking and techniques. This series challenges creative minds to design bigger.
Designing Human-Centric AI Experiences
Applied UX Design for Artificial Intelligence
The Apress logo.
This Apress imprint is published by the registered company APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.
For
Mummy and Ajji, for always loving and supporting me despite not understanding what I do.
Kanika,for always loving and supporting me while understanding what I do.
and our cats, Momo and Shifu,for teaching me that keyboards make for great cat beds.
A photo of two cats.Many of my favorite science fiction authors predict a worldview that I often find inevitable. Humans evolved to be intelligent, and over time, we will imbue intelligence in our things, systems, and environments. In fact, we’ve already started doing this. If I ask you to find information about “Aryabhata,” I am confident you would begin with a Google search. Many of us would prefer our streaming services to suggest things to watch. I used Grammarly, an AI assistant, to correct grammatical mistakes when writing this book. A car that drives itself is just around the corner, and it is not odd to talk to your speaker anymore.
Artificial intelligence is inevitable, and anyone interested in shaping the future should take note. Do an image search for the term artificial intelligence. Many results will be abstract representations of brains, networks, and robots. AI starts to feel like an esoteric technology meant for geniuses in labs churning out sophisticated solutions. While parts of this picture are true, AI is also about how we work, play, and live. It is also about making mundane everyday interactions smarter, more efficient, and easy.
Over the last five years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with AI teams in various large companies and start-ups. I’ve consumed numerous books, videos, podcasts, articles, and research papers on the topic. I’ve spoken to over a thousand people from product management, design, engineering, and research. I realized that there is a gap between a designer’s understanding of how the technology works and the practical realities of building AI products.
AI brings a fundamental shift to how we design products. Instead of specifying rules, AI teams are responsible for curating outcomes based on algorithms and large amounts of data. AI systems are dynamic, they change over time, and their user experience needs to adapt to this change. This calls for a shift in how we think about designing intelligent products.
Designing good AI products is also a highly collaborative process between different disciplines. It is extremely unlikely that a lone designer will be responsible for building and shipping AI. A big part of being a good AI designer is being a good team member.
Over time, I started compiling my learnings on what works and what doesn’t when building AI products and how designers can become effective and impactful team members. This book is merely a distillation of this collected knowledge.
Who Should Read This Book
You should read this book if you are a designer, technologist, researcher, manager, or founder working with or interested in building human-centered AI products. No prior experience with AI is required to read this book. This book can help you identify opportunities for using artificial intelligence to solve problems and create desirable AI products. The contents of this book are also relevant for developers interested in building intuitive interfaces for AI-based solutions.
Overview of Chapters
- 1.
Part 1 (Intelligence) comprises Chapters 1 and 2. We discuss the idea of intelligence, the many meanings of AI, and the view of artificial intelligence this book subscribes to.
- 2.
Part 2 (Decisions) consists of Chapter 3, which talks about making decisions regarding incorporating AI in your workflows and finding opportunities for using it in your organization.
- 3.
Part 3 (Design) focuses on specific design patterns, techniques, and ethical considerations for designing human-centric AI products. This part consists of Chapters 4–8.
- 4.
Part 4 (Teamwork) describes how designers can communicate and collaborate effectively with AI tech teams and consists of Chapters 9 and 10. This section introduces essential AI terminologies, behaviors, and mindsets to help you become an impactful and effective team member.
How to Use This Book
I wrote this book as a practical guide to designing human-centric AI products. And even though I’ve written this book, I’m pretty sure I will have to keep going back to refer to sections from time to time. The pace at which we forget things is astonishing.
While you might want to finish it in one go, in most cases, you will encounter different types of challenges at different times in your product development journey. I would recommend that you read it once and then use the book as a reference whenever you get stuck or when you want to explore different approaches to solve a problem with AI. Think of it as a working handbook for designing AI products, a tool in your design arsenal.
I sincerely hope that you find the contents of this book useful, and I wish you all the best.
Akshay Kore
I am incredibly grateful to many people who supported me, gave critical feedback, and helped sharpen the message. I would like to thank Aagam Shah, Aashraya Sachdev, Abhishek Damodara, Ameet Mehta, Ami Dhaliwal, Amrutha Palaniyappan, Anand Vishwaroop, Ankit Kejriwal, Anupam Taneja, Arka Roy, Ayush Kumar, Betson George, Bharadwaj Radhakrishna, Chandra Ramanujan, Dhivya Sriram, Dhruv Shah, Dileep Mohanan, Emi Sato, Isabella Scheier, Ivy Wang, Jayati Bandyopadhyay, Jonathan D'mello, Kanika Kaul, Kaustubh Limaye, Matt Lee, Mitali Bhasin, Nadia Piet, Natalie Abeysena, Neha Singh, Nirvana Laha, Prasad Ghone, Ritwik Dasgupta, Rohan Verma, Sagar Puranik, Saloni Dandavate, Sanket Lingayat, Shilpa Nair, Shirin Khara, Smith Shah, Srayana Sanyal, Sruzan Lolla, Tejo Kiran, and Thommen Lukose.
This book would not have been possible without the support of my editors, Susan McDermott and Jessica Vakili. They helped me resolve countless doubts and kept me on track. I want to thank Natalie Pao for reaching out and providing me with this opportunity. I’m grateful to Dr. Abhishek Potnis for helping me correct technical inconsistencies.
Writers are nothing without readers. Lastly, I am grateful to you for choosing this book and taking the time to read it. Thank you.
is a product designer and has led the design of AI products at Fortune 500 companies and high-growth start-ups. He studied interaction design at IIT Bombay.
Akshay has written articles for various publications, like HackerNoon, The Startup, UX Planet, UX Collective, etc., on user experience design, artificial intelligence, and voice interfaces. He frequently talks about designing AI products at conferences, design schools, organizations, and podcasts. Currently, he lives in Bangalore, India, with his wife and two cats.
has completed his doctoral degree under the supervision of Prof. Surya Durbha in the GeoComputational Systems and IoT Lab at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. His research interests include geospatial knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing (NLP), deep learning for computer vision, satellite image processing, remote sensing and GIS, and Internet of Things. His doctoral research explored the areas of geospatial semantics and deep learning for satellite image processing, toward leveraging knowledge graphs for enhanced scene understanding of remote sensing scenes.
Abhishek is an open source enthusiast and has been a code contributor to Mozilla Firefox. When not at his terminal or engrossed in a sci-fi novel, he enjoys traveling, capturing, and captioning the world through his camera.