Describe AI in five words or less. 

In this Insights Unlocked episode, Constellation Research’s Liz Miller poses that challenge to Adobe’s Katie Somerville (Cook) during their conversation at The Human Insight Summit (THiS) in Seattle.

“I'm going to do it in the Adobe context,” said Katie, a principal product marketing manager on the Creative Cloud team. “And that’s ‘accelerate your workflow.’ That is what AI is for us. How do you take all of those crazy tasks that you would use 10 tools in Photoshop to do, and how do you do them in 5 seconds?”

In this lively, quick conversation, Liz and Katie discuss: 

• The ways design and research workflows are changing 
• The benefits and challenges, for designers and researchers, of integrating various tools and platforms into unified workflows
• How to increase cross-functional collaboration between design, development and research teams

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How AI can be used in UX research and design

Liz also asked Katie, “if you had a magic wand, which part of the UX research process would you automate and why?”

“We get hours of footage,” said Katie. “We have all these interviews, and I think a human brain can only do so much in terms of synthesis and pulling out key ideas. But if we had some automation in terms of: ‘here are the key topics or here are the keywords,’ it's more than just like, ‘Oh, they said ‘the’ 20 times.’”

She said she spends so much time listening to customer interviews. It “would be incredible” to have a tool that identified key topics and themes in the right context.

“That’s AI getting put to work,” Liz said.

AI at UserTesting

At UserTesting, we’ve been developing AI and Machine Learning-features for a number of years. You can read about the history and future of AI at UserTesting in this recent blog post written by Kaj van de Loo, UserTesting’s Chief Technology Officer.

“Even with all the AI that powers our product, we still remain fundamentally human,” Kaj wrote. “Our ultimate goal is to foster connections between human beings and help customers stay in touch with the human side of business. We use AI to improve those connections—not remove them.”

You can also read about UserTesting’s vision for AI here in this post written by UserTesting’s CEO Andy MacMillan and Chief Scientist Ranjitha Kumar.