Practitioners praise some efficiency gains in process tasks, but are skeptical about the real value in analysis and insight gathering, despite the many marketing claims. Human-centered research and design consultancies are increasingly asked by clients to do their work much faster, using AI tools (e.g. these ones) as shortcuts. Does this approach make sense at all? Let’s zoom in on UX research. Survey of UX researchers shows efficiency gains and low trust The US-based company User Interviews conducted in August 2023 an online survey of 1,093 UX researchers (mainly of the US we presume, althoug ..read more

Media often write about how companies and organizations use surveys, big data analysis, focus groups, and recently AI to conduct consumer or market research and plan for the future of their products and services including their sales strategies, their positioning and their product innovation.  Some have even claimed that the premise on which human-centered research and design is based is all but dead. The double diamond can be retired, some argue. Others write that the entire human-centered approach can be replaced by AI-generated tools or by double jeopardy  “System 1” approaches.&n ..read more

Why people still fall for phishing emails: an empirical investigation into how users make email response decisions Asangi Jayatilaka, Nalin Asanka Gamagedara Arachchilage and Muhammad Ali Babar Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy (USEC) 2024 26 February 2024, San Diego, CA, USA Despite technical and non-technical countermeasures, humans continue to be tricked by phishing emails. How users make email response decisions is a missing piece in the puzzle to identifying why people still fall for phishing emails. We conducted an empirical study using a think-aloud method to investigate how peop ..read more

CHItaly ’23: Proceedings of the 15th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter Editors: Cristina Gena, Luigi De Russis, Davide Spano, Rosa Lanzilotti, Tania Di Mascio, Catia Prandi, Salvatore Andolina Association for Computing Machinery CHItaly 2023: 15th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter, Torino, Italy, September 20 – 22, 2023 20 September 2023 The conference theme is “Crossing HCI and AI”. Indeed, Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) has gained popularity for bringing humans into the center of AI design. HCAI has the potential to create systems that provide i ..read more

“UX professionals must seize the AI career imperative or become irrelevant”, writes Jakob Nielsen in his blog UX Tigers, particularly with current AI-driven tools being “far from user-friendly with their clunky, prompt-driven interfaces”, and with adult (digital) literacy being what it is. “UX folks are trapped in complacency while the AI techquake radically shakes up the computing landscape. We witnessed similar complacency during the dot-com revolution. It is high time we shake off inertia, embrace AI design, and prevent engineers from monopolizing the new UI paradigm.” […] ‘The lessons fro ..read more

Sustainable Innovation: Thinking as Behavioral Scientists, Acting as Designers by Michele Visciola Springer Nature 2023, 256 pages This book puts forward a new paradigm to understand and implement Sustainable Innovation (SI). Innovation without sustainability leaves out large swathes of the population or generates maladaptive or misappropriate behaviors. Innovative solutions will be sustainable if they can retain individual and group differences while offering greater benefits for the common good. When working together, designers, life, human and social behavioral scientists can add value, whi ..read more

UXMatters devoted two articles to the business value of user experience: one by Irwin Hau (Chromatix, Australia) on why companies reject it, and one by Irfan Rehman (Clickysoft, USA) on the benefits of user experience consulting for businesses. Why Do Businesses Reject User Experience? In this article, Irwin Hau explores the five primary reasons that cause businesses to shy away from adopting UX strategies, as well as how individuals can help spark change by exploring User Experience. A lack of understanding of the differences between user-interface (UI) design and UX design Acknowledgment of ..read more

A new area called “human-centered machine learning” (HCML) promises to balance technological possibilities with human needs and values. Put simply, HCML couples technical innovations in ML with social values like fairness, equality, and justice. The focus for HCML is broad; it includes fair and transparent algorithm design, human-in-the-loop decision-making, design for human-AI collaborations, and exploring the social impacts of ML. However, there are no unifying guidelines on what “human-centered” means, nor how HCML research and practice should be conducted. People have worked to a ..read more

Two articles in the last few days took on the world of consulting. Rebecca Ackermann in the MIT Technology Review wrote on how the shine of design thinking has worn off, even at IDEO (which declined to be interviewed for the article). In her long article, she criticized design consultancies that sell snazzy, time-constrained “design thinking” approaches where everyone can become a creative designer who can solve all kinds of challenges. Henry Mance interviewed Mariana Mazzucato in the Financial Times on her new book The Big Con, where she lambasts business consultancies for having no expertise ..read more

In these times of mass tech layoffs (driven by activist investors, according to the FT), Ottawa-based Cornelius Rachieru (“Corneliux”) points out that “a sizeable portion of the layoffs announced by many of the world’s largest tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, IBM, to name a few) include familiar design-related roles like product and UX designers, IAs, visual designers, UX researchers, content strategists, etc..” Cornelius puts that development in a wider context: In the name of ‘specialization’ we embraced over-standardization, and spearheaded the commoditization (or ‘dribble ..read more