In this episode of The Ascend UX Podcast, we discuss the potential of AI to revolutionize the field of UX design. Our guest, Kelsey Ruger, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Hello Alice, shares his insights on how AI can augment our design process, help us create more personalized experiences, and even help us understand empathy in a more nuanced way.
Join us as we chat with Join us as we chat with Kelsey Ruger, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Hello Alice, about her insights on how AI can empower UX designers to create truly exceptional user experiences.
We discuss the different ways AI can augment the UX design process, including:
We'll also explore how AI can help UX designers create more personalized and empathetic experiences.
Finally, we'll discuss the future of UX in a world increasingly powered by AI and how designers can prepare for this new era.
So if you're interested in learning more about the impact of AI on UX design, be sure to tune in to this episode!
[00:00:00] Ayan: welcome back to the Ascend UX podcast, where we explore the ever evolving intersection of technology and user experience. I'm Ayan Bihi, UX manager at PROS. In a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence, some might fear that our role as UX designers might become obsolete. But fear not, fellow designers, because AI is not here to replace us. It could actually be here to empower us.
[00:00:22] Ayan: And today we'll be covering of how AI can transform how we as UX designers can harness its power to create truly exceptional user experiences.
[00:00:30] Ayan: I'll be joined by Kelsey Ruger, Chief Product and Technology Officer at HelloAlice, a platform that connects entrepreneurs with experts and resources.
[00:00:38] Ayan: Good morning, Kelsey. How are you doing today?
[00:00:40] Kelsey: Good morning. Great to be here. Thanks for having
[00:00:42] Ayan: me.
[00:00:42] Ayan: I'm excited to dig deep into the realm of AI, UX and everything in between.
[00:00:46] Ayan: But before we get to that, I'd love to get to know about your career. So today you're chief product and technology officer at Hello Alice. Can you walk me through your career and how you got to that role?
[00:00:56] Kelsey: Sure. I think when I describe this to people, I always tell [00:01:00] them I came up at a time where a lot of the things that are sort of common today, We're sort of fledgling or we didn't really do them like we did before, and so my actual background or my degree, is in computer science because that's what we could do back then.
[00:01:17] Kelsey: Even though all the work I was doing and everything I was doing at school was desktop, so I was learning how to design. I went to a magnet school here in Houston where we learned a lot about design and how to pull those things together. And so my career has really spanned a couple of different areas.
[00:01:34] Kelsey: So deep in technology was always into design. And so when the opportunity for me to step into the world of UX came when our company was purchased by Prodigy and I got the opportunity to learn that world. It really made a lot of sense to combine those two skill sets.
[00:01:52] Ayan: You said that your company was acquired by Prodigy. What tools did you use to help you understand or learn UX ?
[00:01:59] Kelsey: [00:02:00] Back then it was mentors because there were people who had degrees in human computer interaction. And so they were really well versed in the foundational techniques that we know about. And so I learned a lot from especially when I was at Prodigy, whether it was accessibility, usability that's where I was really introduced to it because we had such a large staff there that spanned so many different areas that you could go and learn from those people.
[00:02:27] Kelsey: Before there was a lot of formalized education or resources. Specifically for user experience
[00:02:34] Ayan: I'm sure you're asked this often at dinner parties or conferences, what is UX how do you describe UX to people who may not be familiar with what we do?
[00:02:43] Kelsey: I described UX on a couple of different levels. I think when I think personally about user experience, I'm thinking about the user's experience, not user experience as a discipline. And so it spans a bunch of different areas. Like you got to think about [00:03:00] what is their emotional context? Like what is their background and where are they coming from?
[00:03:03] Kelsey: What are the specific interaction points that you're designing for? So You may think I'm designing a form, but really, you may be designing more than that that goes beyond that form and then understanding the amplifiers. And so, for me, it's really the discipline of tying all of those things together for what we think is an ideal experience, but it's not going to be the same for everyone.
[00:03:26] Kelsey: You're really aiming for from a business perspective is how do we optimize that experience to meet the business goals? And that's kind of how I describe it to my team.
[00:03:36] Kelsey: It's not just. It's not just the visuals, it's not just the business goals, it's all of that stuff combined together.
[00:03:44] Ayan: I guess that makes for a really good challenge, because we're creating these kind of one size fits all products or services, but yet they have to adapt to, as you said, everybody's personal experiences.
[00:03:55] Ayan: So how do you support your team to keep that in mind as they are designing?
[00:03:59] Kelsey: Well, I [00:04:00] think the biggest thing you can do for any team is to One, give them sort of the framework, the constraints that you have for that problem, but then let them go.
[00:04:08] Kelsey: Right. I think it would be like me saying, how do I tell someone to open the best restaurant? A lot of it's going to be based on what that restaurant is doing and what that person's background is. And so I think one of the biggest mistakes that managers make. Is they try to guide the team too much beyond the foundational pieces when you're going to get the best results from letting that team sort of understand the problem and apply it based on either the research that they know the data they have.
[00:04:40] Kelsey: Or their own personal backgrounds.
[00:04:42] Ayan: It seems not just creating a personal experience, but also allowing the designers to create based on their own personal viewpoint of how they can solve that problem.
[00:04:51] Kelsey: As long as it matches the goal that you're trying to achieve.
[00:04:54] Ayan: Stay in scope, but apply your own creativity to that.
[00:04:58] Ayan: Exactly.
[00:04:59] Ayan: When you came a few [00:05:00] weeks ago, you were talking to our team about. The concept of experience and something you said was experience doesn't happen in parts. And I guess that goes back to what you were saying earlier is that it's not looking just at the form.
[00:05:12] Ayan: It's kind of looking at the whole ecosystem. Can you talk a bit more about that?
[00:05:16] Kelsey: This goes back to sort of the restaurant analogy that I gave when we came in is. When you go to a restaurant, you go and you experience that as a whole, you don't experience the hostess and then the waiter and then the food and then the pay all that stuff's combined.
[00:05:32] Kelsey: Right? And I think the mistake we fall into within in the corporate world. Is we start breaking things apart and we don't look at it holistically, even though when you're implementing, you're going to have to eventually break it back down. So you can actually do the work in a systematic way, people just don't experience things separately like that.
[00:05:53] Kelsey: So if you look at a company like Apple, they do an excellent job of this, right? Like, you go into the Apple store, [00:06:00] that experience is very much tuned to the packaging you're going to get.
[00:06:04] Kelsey: It's tuned to what you're going to get when you open the device. So they're looking at it from a whole experience versus Here's my box and only the marketing team looks at that. Here's my software and only the product team looks at it. They're all looking at. The whole piece or the whole experience.
[00:06:23] Ayan: Going on to the example of Apple, what I enjoy about it, it's kind of like you're entering this universe and as a designer, you get to geek out because you really see the intricacies that have been thought of from opening your phone to, even taking a visit in the Apple store, it's quite thought out.
[00:06:39] Ayan: And so how would you then define an experience? Because it seems an experience is pretty much kind of everything. It's not just how I interact with my phone. And I kind of mean an experience from the company perspective.
[00:06:50] Kelsey: I think from each company's perspective, you have to think about for your paying customer, what do you want the experience from the time they become aware of you [00:07:00] to the time they make a purchase? And we actually have a workshop that we teach our small businesses at a Hello, Alice.
[00:07:06] Kelsey: Well, we talk about like, what is the journey from unaware of your company to either a paid customer or repeating customer. And what are the touch points in there? Because all of that is the experience. I think a lot of times in our world, we tend to think of experiences, what happens on the screen, but it's not just that.
[00:07:23] Kelsey: Like if I have to call into customer service and the experience in customer service, doesn't match what I see on screen or what I'm, when I'm interacting with the product, then there's a little bit of misalignment, right? Because. The customer is expecting a certain experience with your company and they may get it in one channel, but not in another channel.
[00:07:43] Kelsey: So I think it's really important to remember it's all the channels. It's all of the interaction points. That ultimately create that experience for that customer.
[00:07:51] Ayan: And it seems that the experiences can then be, if we look from the business perspective, a differentiator . But then how do you create these personalized experiences [00:08:00] for a mass?
[00:08:00] Kelsey: I think that with the introduction of AI that's gonna be a lot easier because as a designer, you can't design for every scenario.
[00:08:09] Kelsey: But if we can use the data that we're collecting about people to help frame that experience.
[00:08:16] Ayan: That's a great segue, which leads into my next question. AI has become and will most likely continue to be a hot topic. How do you feel that AI will impact the role of us as UX designers?
[00:08:27] Kelsey: So to sort of frame this conversation, there's a great documentary, Empire of Dreams. .
[00:08:32] Kelsey: That was released about Star Wars and the sort of journey that they went,, but this one in particular is about the journey that they took from the beginning of Star Wars and all of the things that they went through.
[00:08:45] Kelsey: And one of the things that is mentioned in the film, it doesn't get a lot of highlight is the guys who are used to doing sound effects and effects for movies. They had this very specific way of doing it and George Lucas wanted to bring in computers And he wanted to [00:09:00] bring in all of this electronic way of doing it and it threatened those guys because they were used to I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna find a cup It's going to make this exact sound that represents what I'm doing.
[00:09:12] Kelsey: And he had a vision of what we can do a lot more with computer and electronics. And it eventually led to him starting a studio specifically for that. But it's a lot like that, right? Like, I think anytime new technology comes in, people immediately think, what does this mean for me? That's bad. And in many cases, it could mean what is good for me, that's going to make me better at my job.
[00:09:37] Kelsey: And I think for AI and UX, that's really kind of what I've been focusing on teaching people, is what are the things that you can use AI for that. We as humans just can't do it fast enough, or we could use what the machine produces to help augment our job. And really and you may have heard me say this before, I think there's three things.
[00:09:58] Kelsey: There's [00:10:00] automation, augmentation, and then you gotta be aware of what should be autonomous, meaning you let humans do that because you're just better at it. And so I think if you can break your work into like, how can I use. AI to automate my job. And there's lots of those today, but I think the biggest area for or UX designers is in the augmentation.
[00:10:24] Kelsey: And how do we use UX to make us better or faster at the things that we're doing on an everyday basis.
[00:10:32] Ayan: I think for one example would be the data that you're talking about. That we're not able to process and examine all this data at a speed that maybe an AI model would be able to do it. Are there other examples that come to mind for you in regards of how it could augment our process as designers?
[00:10:47] Kelsey: Well, there's three areas that I would say you can look at.
[00:10:49] Kelsey: tHe first is detection. So being able to detect things like images. Human behavior a big one for, a lot of us is [00:11:00] like abuse and fraud. Right? So machines are going to be better at recognizing patterns that are abusive or fraudulent.
[00:11:09] Kelsey: The second area is prediction. And we've seen this for years now, right? Like Amazon, Netflix. They all have recommendation engines. The thing that we are starting to really look at is collective behavior. Like, so what do we do as a group that might be representative of a certain type of solution we should be looking at?
[00:11:29] Kelsey: And probably the most, the most generative, right? So you've got chat GPT, you've got mid journey, you've got tools that can generate music. And I think. In that area, they can be both augmenting so they can help us do our work faster. But the other thing is they could be supporting, meaning if you are trying to write and you want to have someone edit, you can have the machine help you with your editing.
[00:11:55] Kelsey: And so those three areas are really. I think a lot of [00:12:00] places where you can find a lot of opportunities for a designer. Just thinking through how you apply that to your work is really going to be what we have to do next.
[00:12:08] Ayan: So does this mean the end of Lorem Ipsum ?
[00:12:10] Kelsey: I actually think it does. I actually haven't used lorem ipsum in so long because usually I can find tools that generate text that looks almost real. But the thing we always think about this kind of goes back to the experience, right? And so one of the things we figured out years ago is you really should generate text that is almost what you're going to experience in practice anyway.
[00:12:35] Kelsey: So think about like you remember when you used to mock up an interface. And you'd put in a name and usually it's the name of someone, you know, but it's never the names that you might see in production. Right? And so eventually you run into a name. It doesn't fit because nobody planned enough space for it.
[00:12:51] Kelsey: And so I think for things like that, the machine can actually help you identify things like that. As long as it knows what rules you're trying to follow.
[00:12:58] Ayan: Something that I was [00:13:00] thinking about, and I'd love to get your opinion on, is in design, we often talk about empathy. Something that's synonymous with our role. We have to be empathetic to our users in order to properly design for them. Do you think that AI models can be trained to apply empathy?
[00:13:13] Kelsey: Let me ask you a question. Like when you when you think of empathy as a designer what does that mean to you?
[00:13:20] Ayan: I think it's stepping away from my needs and trying to understand needs that I have yet to face as a person.
[00:13:25] Ayan: And I think the most clear example is saying, putting yourself in somebody else's shoes.
[00:13:30] Kelsey: So this is a topic that I talk about a lot because my view of how we have applied empathy, especially over the last eight years. Has has really changed because I think a lot of times when people say empathy, what they really mean is I feel for people who have the same view as me when true empathy is what you said is being able to literally step outside yourself.
[00:13:54] Kelsey: And if you have to design a solution for a group that you don't agree with. That you can actually do that. [00:14:00] And so for me, when I think about whether or not an AI model could do that, the question is, what data would we teach it about each type of solution to get to true empathy? So that regardless of whether or not the person who owns the model or who's teaching it agrees with it, that the model has been taught data that actually allows it to be empathetic.
[00:14:24] Ayan: Empathy is often considered to be a human trait. So are we able to train computers to have that characteristic to be human?
[00:14:34] Kelsey: Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm not convinced that all humans have empathy.
[00:14:38] So it's a tough one, right? Like, can you be empathetic , if you don't operate on emotions possibly, but I think it gets back to the definition of empathy and, and how you're applying it too.
[00:14:50] Ayan: Yeah, it's, I always see the analogy with each new technology kind of like, It's kind of the babushka dolls, . I believe they're called. I guess AI is the current topic, but it's just going [00:15:00] to open up more experiences or more questions with each new technology that we're faced with.
[00:15:05] Kelsey: Yeah, if you think about it now, when do you use your phone?
[00:15:07] Ayan: I guess
[00:15:08] Ayan: It's to see and interact with content.
[00:15:10] Kelsey: And a lot of the stuff that you think about, there's other form factors that we could use, right? So, if you think about the common uses, like, Texting and calling those today already can be done on other phones. And then you pull in like when you're consuming content, how do you pull that in?
[00:15:31] Kelsey: And what do you want to do with it? So I think you will start to see content be woven into other. Things that we're consuming, like television, , more streaming. And so the next 10 to 15 years will be very interesting , in both what we're seeing in the technology we use and how AI is helping to guide that.
[00:15:53] Ayan: And then to bring it back to designers, how do you think our role will evolve with that? If we're not designing for screens, does it go [00:16:00] back to what you were saying earlier about designing more so about the experiences?
[00:16:03] Kelsey: Yep. I think designing for the experiences and understanding the technology and tools well enough to be able to orchestrate like what's happening when you combine all of these tools.
[00:16:14] Ayan: That would also bring us into different roles , maybe a bit more of a business hat, as well, because we kind of have to think about the different touch points or other elements, our role would evolve towards.
[00:16:24] Kelsey: I already think designers should be thinking more like product managers.
[00:16:28] Kelsey: But they should also be very well versed in the technology. I say all the time, like, 1 of the biggest weaknesses you can have. Is not fully understanding the technology well enough to craft the solution.
[00:16:40] Ayan: We're always intermediaries as designers. We're just never designing, right? We have to understand the technical limitations of our work as well as the business impact.
[00:16:49] Kelsey: Yeah, and I think going back to the traditional definition of a designer, as we've progressed in the tech world, design has become what's on screen when design [00:17:00] is really about pulling together all of these things to create a holistic end.
[00:17:07] Ayan: So today we've delved into the fascinating world of AI, and most importantly, it's a potential to enhance user experiences. Thank you for joining me in this exploration of AI and most importantly, the impact of AI in our roles of UX designers.
[00:17:20] Ayan: But amidst these advancements, it seems that our role of putting the user first becomes even more paramount. So to my fellow UX designers out there, don't worry. AI is not coming to take our jobs, but instead it's here to play a pivotal role in ensuring that AI models and products are not only functional, but are trustworthy, ethical, and deeply rooted in the human centered principles that we hold so dear as designers.
[00:17:43] Ayan: So the future of UX lies in this fusion of human and machine. And it's our job to make sure that those are well balanced.
[00:17:50] Ayan: So thank you again, Kelsey. I really appreciate you sitting down and providing some food for thought for myself as well as our audience.
[00:17:56] Ayan: as our audience knows, we are designers and we love [00:18:00] feedback, so please feel free to send , questions, comments, to ascenduxatpros. com. That is a-S-C-E-N-D ux@pros.com. Also, feel free to rate, follow, and subscribe, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever service you're using to listen to us today.
Ayan: So thank you again, Kelsey, and it's been a pleasure to sit down and chat with you about all things AI and UX.
Ayan: thank you.
[00:18:23]