#89 Quartly Update: Big Changes in the UX-Industry
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Hello and welcome back to the future of UX. I'm Patricia Reiners, your host, and in today's episode, we will do a quarterly update on what's new and on what's exciting in the world of UX. Of course, with a strong focus on our favorite topic, AI. So the past few months have been packed with innovation, with insights,

And I'm definitely excited to share them with you. Maybe you've heard about some of them already, but we will cover the latest trends in AI like synthetic personas, AI avatar show meetings and much more. Plus, I will be sharing some personal highlights and insights from my own project. So I would say let's dive right in.

So for me the last few months have been very busy and I wanted to share some updates so some things that happened in my life as a freelance innovation designer based in Zurich, Switzerland and I can say that this September was really jam-packed. Yeah I had a lot of talks, a lot of workshops

And one of the highlights for me was one of the workshops that I led in early October on generative AI in the design process.

for the UX Prompt Conference in Hamburg. It's a conference that's focusing especially on AI, on innovation, on the future basically. And it was so much fun discussing the impact on AI in the design industry and really talking about how this is changing the way we work and how we approach UX. And I had a wonderful workshop there. I really loved it. I had amazing participants. It was so much fun.

And of course, I had the chance to connect with so many intertheistic designers and it really reinforced me as well or how transformative AI has become in our field. And something that makes me so happy is also to see designers who are excited about the future, who are willing to learn and

to expand their knowledge and their field of expertise and I think this is super super nice and such an important skill at the moment and the second big highlight for me this summer were actually the

launch of the third round of my AI for Designers course. I used the summer to completely basically redo the course. I updated many parts of the course. I improved some things and I also added a brand new model about designing for or designing for AI products. And I was really excited to start into this new cohort.

And what can I say? The participants are amazing, bringing so much energy and creativity to the table. So it's such a joy to see them engaged with the AI tools, with the methods, with the framework and discover new ways to incorporate all these things into their work.

Design workflows. So this is definitely one of my highlights because I'm putting like so much love and effort in these courses. So it's absolutely amazing to see all the people really thriving and having this wonderful cohort now. So this is something that was definitely my highlight this summer. But as many of you know, usually I'm taking the summer off. So I'm taking off usually July and August.

I'm not doing any projects. I'm still doing the podcast normally, so I'm not doing a summer break. But I don't do any projects and I use the time usually for my own education. So I'm reading books, I do courses, I don't know, like anything that I feel pushes me a little bit forward. Or also some time to recharge and relax, to be completely honest. But yeah, this summer...

I couldn't really resist joining an absolutely fascinating AI project. So I got the opportunity to join this AI project and I couldn't say no. The team is absolutely incredible. I still work with them until the end of the year probably. And the work was so fulfilling that I didn't really regret a single moment of it. It's been such a rewarding experience working on

such an amazing project, also cutting edge AI application and design and I'm very very happy about it. Although I'm missing a little bit my summer break, maybe I'm doing this in winter now, let's see what's going on. But the summer for me has been, yes, very busy, not so recharging, I didn't do any vacation. I was mainly working and focusing on AI and

It didn't feel too bad for me because I'm so excited about everything that's going on and thought this is also a nice opportunity to give a little quarterly update and talk about some things that I found very very exciting in the UX space in the last three four months in the last quarter. And let's talk about some of the biggest changes we've seen in UX recently.

in the AI-driven workflows and let's break it down into some top trends. I'm going to talk about three things that I find absolutely fascinating and interesting. And the first thing that I'm seeing becoming more and more populated and something that I'm seeing becoming more and more popular are AI-generated personas.

So we all know what personas are, right? So after the research phase, you define all the insights that you did or that you gained from the user interviews or from the surveys or anything, any kind of research, and you combine everything basically and put them in a persona that you can share with your stakeholders that you can talk about. And these are not real people. This is basically a combination of different people, different stereotypes.

And in recent months, the use of AI-generated personas, so personas that were not created by a human but by an AI, has gained traction in UX design. They are offering a convenient way to automate the creation of user personas based on large datasets.

And of course you can do this with tools like ChatGPT. You can easily input UX interview transcripts and generate personas that reflect user behavior or user needs. You can still create personas without any background. And this can be helpful in speeding up the design process. However, there are some serious concerns to consider and I definitely want to talk about it. So on one hand,

There are tools like Synthetic Users or Synthetic Personas. The tool is actually called Synthetic Users. I'm going to link the website below. It's pretty interesting. It's a website where you can generate not only personas but where you can chat with your users.

So basically with AI users that are not real. So this sounds pretty interesting because you are actually saving a lot of money. You don't need to schedule any interviews. You don't need to pay for it. So it's pretty cheap way to get insights. But

the insights are generated from an AI and not from real users. And there are a lot of discussions going on at the moment in the design industry. Some people are thinking, oh, this is actually pretty helpful using this synthetic users. We have at least some kind of research. Other people are saying this is totally superficial and not something that we should use or that we should promote.

And I am personally a little bit critical towards these tools because what I'm seeing is, or still seeing, is that a lot of companies are still cutting the budget for user research and more and more people realizing that AI can do the job, you know, for a small amount of usual research budget won't bring us anywhere because it's not the same results. So I would always recommend when you use

AI to create a persona or any kind of deliverable or any kind of summarization of the research insights, it needs to be based on real user research. If it's not, then I wouldn't create it, right? Then those are just assumptions and then you also need to treat them as 100% assumptions that you need to validate throughout the design process.

Because what we always need to think about, even when we're seeing those super nice personas, they're not real. They're not based on real user insights. So when you use tools like Synthetic Users, for example, input all the different interview assets that you're already having and use them as the guidelines, as the resource basically that AI is using to come up with more insights about the persona. Although I personally...

I know that some people are really believing in these tools, but I'm very critical. I think it's still better to come up with assumptions, to think a little bit about what this person would say, start with assumptions, then validate them. You probably don't need an AI for that.

So as you can hear, I'm not a huge fan of synthetic users. They can be useful, but not only when they're based on really extensive prior research. If certain topics or areas still need validation, AI personas can be helpful supplements. But they should never be relied upon the sole source of insight. And talking about synthetic personas or AI personas, there's another thing that I find pretty interesting. The development where it comes to...

or especially in addressing hard to reach users. For instance, users with accessibility needs often don't appear as frequently in traditional UX research studies, you know, making them definitely a critical but underserved group. And I recently came across a fascinating project called LI A11 and then Epsilon,

by a German agency and this tool analyzes websites through the lens of accessibility. They're generating personas or they already generated personas based on real user behavior and then these personas are basically judging the website that you are uploading, right? So they're giving feedback like, oh, the contrast is not high enough and like pretty interesting. So they have...

created these personas that have different disabilities or not disabilities. And I think what's really cool here is that it allows you to switch between the views, the tech and accessibility focus, giving your designers a more comprehensive understanding of how users with disabilities interact with digital products. Although ideally, you would already invite users

users with any kind of accessibility issues into your studies. Most of the times it's not really a priority, unfortunately. So the idea of using AI personas in this way is compelling and I think especially for ensuring that we don't overlook crucial aspects like accessibility. I'm super curious also to hear your thoughts about AI personas and especially generating AI or synthetic personas for underserved groups.

people who have certain disabilities or accessibility issues. So I'm super curious to hear your thoughts. Feel free to share that in the comments of this podcast. I'm definitely going to check it out and curious to hear your thoughts about it. Now I want to move to the second important topic that I find absolutely fascinating and it goes a little bit in the same direction.

we're seeing that more and more tasks are being automated, right? Some things are time consuming like translation or checking typos, writing emails, creating visuals, like all these things we already understood that those things will probably be automated at some point.

But there's another really big thing that takes up for most people, especially people who are a little bit more advanced in their career, like 60, 70, maybe 80 percent of their time, which are meetings. And one tool came up with an interesting idea. The tool is called HeyGen. I'm going to link it below in case you want to check it out. And this tool is

provides interactive AI avatars of yourself who can join a meeting for you. So you train these avatars based on anything that you want. Your, I don't know, the research doc that you would like to present, any kind of insights. You basically put it all into this avatar and then people can have a real Zoom meeting.

with your avatar. So you're not going to join anymore, but the avatar who looks exactly like you is going to do the Zoom meeting for you. Yes, this is now possible. AI avatars are being trained to represent you in online meetings, understand your task and respond on your behalf. It sounds like an amazing time saver for those days when you're juggling multiple meetings.

But it's still important to monitor how these avatars perform to avoid any awkward situation. So, to be completely honest, of course I tried it out. I need to say, it's still very obvious that this is an AI avatar. So, I think no one would think that this is the real you. It still looks like an AI-generated avatar, but...

We shouldn't judge this by the situation as we're seeing right now, because those tools are also going to improve over time. So thinking about six months ahead, a year ahead, two years ahead, these AI avatars will get so much better that at some point you won't be able to distinguish that easily between an AI avatar and a real person in a meeting.

And then I'm thinking, wouldn't it be funny if all our AI avatars are having the meetings, you know, taking the notes, creating the summaries, creating the presentations, doing all the work for us where we are doing nothing anymore. This definitely won't be the case, but I think it's pretty, pretty interesting to think about an avatar who is doing the meetings for you. And now moving into trend number three, which I find pretty, pretty fascinating as well. And this is everything around AI prototyping.

There are a ton of amazing AI prototyping tools out there. Thinking about Galileo AI, thinking about UI SART, thinking about the Figma integration, the AI Figma prototyping tool. Yeah, some people are very critical about it. They are very unsure of how it should be used. I personally see a big, big trend coming and this is

helping people who are not designers, maybe managers or product designers or developers articulate their ideas. And Miro, yesterday actually I was invited to the Leaders Summit from Miro here in Zurich. I think they're doing like a little round trip in every city and then they're inviting different leaders and

from the city basically and talk about AI. They had different keynotes and they shared also their updates that they announced, I think, beginning of October or so. So also, Miro is doing a lot of a lot of AI advancements, and I think it's pretty cool to see. And they are mostly targeting non-designers with these new AI features, for example.

Uisart, one of the big AI prototyping tools got acquired by Miro and Miro now included Uisart in their product. I already assumed that this would happen at some point but they already did that so you can prototype now in Miro. So you enter basically a prompt, how it should look like and then it creates a whole flow for you in Miro.

Nothing that we as designers are super excited about because we would do it so much better and not really faster, but definitely better. But when I'm talking with product managers or project managers or product owners or developers or anyone, they're all really excited about it. And I'm seeing this in my own workshops that I'm having with my clients now.

We're doing like random sketches. Some people are not really comfortable with like sharing their ideas. They can't really articulate. They can't really draw what they're thinking about. So these tools really help to break down the boundaries when it comes to presenting your ideas. And I think this is a big, big trend that I'm seeing, which also moves into the whole topic of collaboration, like collaborating together, helping everyone to express their ideas and communicate.

And something that in the past designers were 100% needed because they needed to visualize basically every idea, they needed to create other prototypes and now people can do that themselves. This is not something that's ready to take to development or that's ready to implement. Those are just like the very first draft, especially when it comes to designing new products or features, where you come up with some first ideas. Not something that you would design and then ship, right?

And I think this is something that we should keep a very close eye on and monitor what is possible and then be able to moderate these discussions that are happening as a designer. So helping other people in our organizations, in our team to use these new features, the new prototyping features to articulate their ideas. I think this is a super, super big trend that I'm seeing.

So for me, the most exciting things that I find interesting are first of all, using AI to create any kind of deliverables. This can be synthetic users. And I have different opinions, right? Generally, I'm very critical. But on the other hand, I think it's sometimes very interesting to use this as a starting point for research. And then the second topic that I find pretty fascinating are everything around AI avatars

For a meeting. So having basically a second person, like a metaverse person who's joining the metaverse. Zoom can also be a metaverse, right? Who's joining a meeting and is doing basically the work for you. This does not work for every meeting, but maybe for interviewing participants, right? Something...

where you do user research, for example, and you just interview the participants, for example, right? Or where you have job applications, so where you are actually hiring, right? And you need to go through, I don't know, 20 interviews or so. I mean, I don't say that this is the perfect scenario for it, but I think it's definitely interesting.

And topic number three, which is prototyping, which will become or is already becoming so easy for everyone. So as we look to the future, it's clear that AI is here to stay. And with all the advancements, there are still a few challenges we need to tackle as designers. And I think the first are definitely or the first is definitely the ethical consideration. AI generated content is great, but it comes with some ethical challenges, particularly around transparency and biases.

We need to ensure that the AI systems we use are fair, equitable, and don't perpetuate harmful biases. As AI becomes more integrated into UX, our role as designers will be to monitor these systems and make sure they serve all users effectively.

And the second important topic is AI and personalization. AI is also becoming increasingly adept to personalizing user experiences. Whether it's through adaptive interfaces or content personalization, AI tools are helping us create more engaging, user-centric designs.

However, this also raises the bar for what's considered a great user experience. It's no longer just about functionality. Users expect personalized emotional connections with the product they use.

So I hope this quarterly update was interesting to you. And if you like this podcast, maybe if you're listening to the episodes every week and you are a loyal follower, something that would make me so, so happy is if you could rate the podcast with a five-star review. This would really help me to grow the podcast, to make these episodes, to do research, to invite amazing participants in.

do interviews with. So your support really, really means the world to me. I know that usually people don't rate podcasts, but this is something that would make me really, really happy. I'm always going through the reviews and reading them and it makes me so happy. So thank you so much for also everyone who already did that. I appreciate that and this is definitely something that helps me so, so much. Just like a tiny thing, but

means the world to me so thank you so much for your support i really really appreciate that

And yeah, that's it for today's quarterly update. We've covered a lot of ground, you know, from AI personas and avatars to my personal highlights and also AI prototyping, some future trends. And I'm really excited about where AI is headed. And I hope this episode gave you some valuable insights into the changes and opportunities coming your way.

As always, thank you so much for listening. And if you want to stay up to date with more UX trends, you can also subscribe to my UX newsletter where I'm sharing content and links and resources. You can find the link in the description box. And I will be back with another episode next week. And until then, take care and hear you in the future.