Experience with IBM AI tools
Our team project is Ally — a productivity assistant equipped with AI technology.
What worked well
During the whole process, we followed the AI Design Thinking exercise on Mural.
In phase 0, it's helpful to rethink about the stakeholder goals and the team goals. Because we’re designing a Web APP for students, UT. We may have personal bias in it and lose empathy or being objective.
In phase 1: User Traits — Prioritize intents + ethics, bias, privacy and phase 2: the data, it’s meaningful to think back about your product because you are using AI technology to design a product. When users are interacting with the product, Ally requires tons of metadata from users. They may cause many concerns, privacy protection, bias issues, etc. These issues are thought-provoking which I believe is the same in other AI-related projects.
So our team takes a step back to think about how to prevent users from these concerns. We think of internal logic processing, multiple points of identity verification to protect the user data.
In phase 3: As-is AI Opportunities, and phase 4: Big Idea Vignettes, these two phases helps us think thoroughly about the storytelling, the as-is journey v.s. to-be journey. We did an affinity diagram for the big ideas and vote for the final ones. After that, we build our story around these keywords: Quick set-up, Learn bio clock/work pattern, Customization(Restricted time, Fragment huge work, Reschedule, Estimation, Prioritization, Work mode), Habit & performance tracking and analysis, Privacy Protection.
This helps me rethink about when you are explaining your idea or your product, how to build further rapport with the audience, let them use your product and trust you.
What could’ve worked better
Overall, it’s a marvelous Human-to-Machine Communication Model for the whole team to use, learn and iterate!
But I think to some degree, it misses the whole team’s collaboration pattern. People are not familiar with each other’s work pattern which is also one of the insights from our research: people have different work pattern, attention spans and best work time. So I think phase 0 can be the team’s collaboration style. Then the original phase 0 can begin with the whole work process.
Tips
It’s better for futures users to think about the big ideas, storytelling after the research analysis.
AI is fancy and everything could be possible if you equip your ideas with AI technology.
Always be careful about empathy and bias as AI can be an indifferent tool which just requires tons of data.
I really like the medium agenda which is new, clear and flexible. It’s easy for instructors to share interesting online articles and activities. It's useful to read the articles Jen share on medium agenda!
Yiping
