Top Articles of the Week #18 : User Experience (UX)

Top UX Articles of the week. These are articles talk about UX of AI from google’s UX community, How to Align UX with product management and importance of usability tests.

The UX of AI

As was the case with the mobile revolution, and the web before that, machine learning will cause us to rethink, restructure, and reconsider what’s possible in virtually every experience we build. In the Google UX community, we’ve started an effort called “human-centered machine learning” to help focus and guide that conversation. Using this lens, we look across products to see how machine learning (ML) can stay grounded in human needs while solving for them—in ways that are uniquely possible through ML. Our team at Google works across the company to bring UXers up to speed on core ML concepts, understand how to best integrate ML into the UX utility belt, and ensure we’re building ML and AI in inclusive ways.

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How to Align UX with Product Management

The biggest challenge to the User Experience role can be the product manager who has sign off authority. This is fine if the product manager intends to embrace what you do and use it to their advantage. But in the case where they have no intention of listening to someone they perceive as a threat… it can mean that your work gets ignored each and every time. You have to accept that change takes time to deliver. There are some simple methods that you can use to improve the chances that your work will be valued and used.

Usability Test, Even When You Know the Answer

Sometimes, as UX professionals, we must perform seemingly wasteful activities for the greater good. One of them is conducting usability studies when we can predict the outcome. Usability studies serve multiple purposes. The most obvious benefit is to figure out how to best address user needs, by identifying those design elements that do or do not work. However, an equally powerful, and often neglected, benefit to usability testing is consensus building. Usability studies are a persuasion tool. When your design recommendations meet resistance, it can be better to show rather than tell.