Nobody likes being on the receiving end of AI

Описание: Recently, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, told a Bloomberg reporter that he uses Microsoft’s AI to summarize emails his team sends him.

Imagine being someone who worked for hours writing something for Nadella, only to find out they outsourced the reading to an algorithm?

People don’t like being on the receiving end of AI usage.

Job applicants hate it when they learn a company has used AI to screen their application.

Hiring managers don’t like it when they discover a job candidate used AI to embellish their résumé and other application materials.

College professors dislike it when students use AI to do their assignments, while college students complain when their professors use AI to create their lectures.

And nobody likes dealing with a customer service chatbot. For many people, the first response is to try to convince the chatbot to refer them to a real human.

All this is to say that, if you’re implementing AI functionality, you’ve got a two-party UX problem. While Microsoft’s Nadella is proud of his AI summaries, it’s unlikely his people are too happy that he never reads them. If they knew he only wanted a summary, why didn’t they just write it instead of letting the LLM hallucinate a summary?

There are 2 parties in these scenarios: The people using AI to summarize emails and the people who write them. The job candidates and the hiring managers. The college students and the professors.

When we’re working on the user experience of AI functionality, we need to think about both parties. This is a new consideration for UX.

In the past, if we were designing the UX of an email client or a job application system, we’d focus only on one party. We’d focus on the email recipient or sender, but not both. We’d focus on the job applicant or the application reviewer, not both.

But many AI transactions involve multiple parties, and now we need to think about all of them simultaneously. We must find a way to make both sides feel that our AI functionality improves their lives, not worsens them.

AI opens us up to social problems, where there are multiple sides to any design. The trick is to identify solutions that improve everyone’s lives, not just a single party’s experience at the expense of everyone else.

When you’re designing AI functionality, how are you focusing on the needs of all the parties involved, not just your primary audience?

Check out our UX & Design in an AI World: Strategic Fundamentals course for more information: https://maven.com/centercentre/uxai