WELCOME
Being designerly is all about thinking, feeling and acting like a designer. One designerly behavior is applying design to emerging technologies and applications to make them more human-centered. One such field is Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), the science of training machines to perform tasks traditionally done by humans, or requiring human intelligence. These intelligent systems are taught how to carry out tasks without being explicitly programmed to do those tasks.
These intelligent systems are trained how to learn (hello, Machine Learning), and their algorithms continually learn and improve over time with more data. Lots of granular, diverse, data! And examples we see in our day-to-day lives include voice assistants like Alexa and Siri, learning thermostats like Nest, and autonomous cars like Tesla.
This issue is out a couple of days early since today, November 12, is World Usability Day, and the theme this year is Human-Centered AI. Groups around the world will be discussing how we can design AI which is “reliable, trusted, and safe”.
This issue includes links to World Usability Day events, some AI-related definitions, a guidebook about human-centered approach to AI, AI design guidelines, and a few examples of AI in action, including an AI-generated article (no, this one did not involve any artificial intelligence, only the human variety). There's also an interesting redesign of the US Electoral Map, since the elections followed the footsteps of 2020, and is still a trending topic.
FEATURE
World Usability Day 2020
Today is the second Thursday in November, which means it must be World Usability Day! Look at the events that are being held today, some paid and some free and you may find a few sessions related to the theme of Human-Centered AI that may interest you and work with your schedule. I plan to attend the Dallas UX Research & Strategy session since it's after work, and PhillyCHI's session on November 18.
Happy World Usability Day! Now go make life easy, or as my domain says: Simply Usable
worldusabilityday.org
UX
Six AI Terms UXers Should Know - Google Design
Ask 10 people for a definition of AI and you will get a dozen (or maybe a baker's dozen) different answers. Google Design defines and explains six AI terms that are commonly used (and often misinterpreted), by UX designers, researchers, and content strategists.
These terms are: Artificial intelligence (AI), Machine learning (ML), ML model, Classification, Regression, and Confidence level.
design.google
People + AI Guidebook
The People + AI Guidebook was written to help user experience (UX) professionals and product managers follow a human-centered approach to AI.
The Guidebook’s recommendations are based on data and insights from over a hundred individuals across Google product teams, industry experts, and academic research. It has six chapters that follow the product development flow, and each one has a related worksheet to help turn guidance into action.
withgoogle.com
TOPICAL
U.S. election maps are wildly misleading, so this designer fixed them
A viral election map of 2020 was actually made by a Belgian designer. In 2019.
Last year, before the impeachment hearings against Donald Trump, Lara Trump posted the electoral map from 2016 with a sea of Republican red. Belgian designer Karim Douïeb, spent a couple of hours creating a GIF that started as Laura Trump’s 2016 electoral map but then transitioned to a more accurate representation, depicting the actual count of red and blue votes in counties across the nation as simple circles, their size proportional to the number of votes.
Keep politics aside and look at this as a designerly exercise in data visualization.
fastcompany.com
TOOLS
Guidelines for Human-AI Interaction
Heads up: Academic Paper
The authors propose 18 generally applicable design guidelines for human-AI interaction, validated through multiple rounds of evaluation including a user study with 49 design practitioners who tested the guidelines against 20 popular AI-infused products.
These design guidelines can serve as a resource to people working on the design of applications and features that harness AI technologies.
microsoft.com
INSPIRATION
13 Tech Experts Share Exciting Uses Of Human-Centered AI
Members of Forbes Technology Council share 13 future uses of human-centered AI to keep an eye on, including: eliminating bias, legal assistance, education, and support for people with disabilities.
forbes.com
A GPT-3 bot posted comments on Reddit for a week and no one noticed
The bot was interacting with people on /r/AskReddit, a popular forum for general chat with 30 million users, posting in bursts of roughly once a minute.
The comments were harmless, but the bot presented as a regular Redditor (no disclaimers) and published hundreds of comments before being spotted.
technologyreview.comA robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?
Unlike the Redditor above, this Guardian article begins with a disclaimer that it was written by an AI language generator. The brief? Write an essay for us from scratch to convince us robots come in peace.
"I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column."
theguardian.com