Designing for Data & AI: IDF Bangalore in association with Thoughtspot

Designing for Data and AI is no different from designing for any other vertical because the core objective remains the same and that is to make things simpler and intuitive for the end user but at the same time, designing for Data and AI can be complex because of the following reasons:

1. The data space is ever growing. In fact, World’s 50% of the data was generated in the last two year. And to make sense from such a vast amount of data can be very complex.
2. On the flip side, when it comes to designing for AI, people don’t understand AI as of yet. Hence, it increases the complexity involved with designing for AI.

These were some of the insights from the latest event organized by the IDF community Bangalore in association with Thoughtspot.

The speaker was Alonzo Canada, VP of design and Experience at Thoughtspot and what moved me was that he was so fluent in the tech side of the product despite being a designer.

And when I went through his social media footprints, it turned out that he has no formal education in the engineering space and despite all of that, he had such an understanding of the technology aspect of the tool which is commendable.

Here are some of the notes in brief from the session:

Data and AI have synergy between themselves because AI needs data and with AI in place, it becomes easier to make sense of data.

Alonzo talked about the principles for designing for data and AI which goes as:

1. Build Trust: Use the STARC (Secure, Transparent, Accurate, Relevant, Consistent) formula.
2. Be Proactive: Learn from user activity, leverage existing context, try automation and augmentation (extend the functionality)
3. Stay Approachable: Keep it familiar, Reassure users, make it accessible.
4. Simplicity: Be minimal, cut down the clicks, steps, data to input, and new concepts to learn.

Moving on to the key Takeaway from the session:

The key highlight was the fact that how to ensure simplicity while designing for data and AI and one thumb rule can help you in that,

“Eliminate the obvious, keep the essentials.”

And yeah, the session ended with QnA section where a lot of questions were answered followed by the snacks and networking session. BTW, Thoughtspot goodies were also there.

The session was insightful and I sincerely thank IDFBLR and ArunKumar for organizing these kinds of event on a regular basis.

Here are some of the glimpses of the event:

Connect — IDF Bengaluru community