Generative AI | Week 1 | Micro UX

Brief

Design a way for a person to pass as a ‘generative AI’ in an everyday setting

Teammates

9 team mates | Akriti Goel, Changlin (Charlie) Hou, Hong Zhou, Jakob Prufer, Rebecca Hodge, Ruoxi Song, Tanya Singh, Qibin Chen, Xiaole (Zoey) Zang

Timeframe

7 weeks | 20.04 – 08.06.2023

Methods

Secondary research, Roleplay, Card sorting

Development

Excited and allocated specified research tasks and went after them

[picture]

Secondary research

Videos come here

Team’s perception of Voice Assistants

• The depiction of Siri was feminine in nature – colourful and stylish;
• Siri’s personality was explained to be, warm, friendly, and polite, with a touch of old-fashioned charm and formality.

Generative AI responses

Role-playing

Generative AI actor should:

• maintain composure and avoid laughter;
• be impartial and not take sides;
• provide useful information;
• indicate that it is processing information.

Turing Tests

Artefact analysis of Siri voice assistant

Project plan

Reflection

We accomplished a lot and gained useful insights, but our research lacked focus and depth, in my opinion. We could have been more intentional to avoid wasting time and energy. Some methods were used without questioning them, leading to a lack of quality in approach and measurement.

Working in this team and process challenged me in a positive way.

As someone interested in UX research, I tend to value spending more time testing and developing research tools before applying them to our target users which takes out the pace and energy from the process. Yet, I believe I should have tried to contribute more of these values to the team, however, the short timeframe we have made it impossible to counterbalance our hasty research.

What is left was to adapt to the situation. 

I am confident to state that I am fine working rapidly as I have proven in my previous experiences. However, the difference I think is in the fact that they were closer to the traditional mainstream UX design where the process is much more straightforward. This project, like all the ones I had on this master’s degree on the other hand, deals with significantly complex matters in uncharted territories. I attribute my struggle to still developing the necessary skills and expertise for such scenarios.

This suggests to me that much more critical thinking in approaching the matter is needed. Tools need to be mindfully tweaked and applied or approaches from much more distant disciplines are needed. Yet I am still building experience working this way so this can also suggest my relatively slow pace in this scenario.

Furthermore, this experience has highlighted the need for me to take bigger risks by being more creative in the research methods I use and addressing my tendency to be rigid and traditional in my research approach.