Episode 100 | November 13, 2023

Bridging the gap: AI's role in design optimization

In this Insights Unlocked episode, Liz Miller interviews UserTesting’s Chief Scientist Ranjitha Kumar about her unique perspective on integrating AI and machine learning (ML) into UX and experience research.

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Bridging the gap: AI's role in design optimization

How are you looking at AI and its role in experience research?

Is it as Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 the computer overlord out to get us? Or as Star Wars’ R2D2 saving everyone time after time?

“People think of AI as this thing that inherently wants to take your job,” said Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “… We've trained ourselves to think about it like Space Odyssey’s HAL. Like, ‘HAL is trying to kill us all.’ Actually, no, it’s bridging the gap between our inability to see and calculate all this data. And it’s doing it so that we can bridge the gap in our own creativity.”

In this week’s Insights Unlocked, Liz interviews UserTesting’s Chief Scientist Ranjitha Kumar about her unique perspective on integrating AI and machine learning (ML) into UX and experience research.

AI Integration in UX

AI is already helping with the qualitative coding of research data and sorting through research videos.

“That's where everyone spends hours and hours just watching video, coding transcripts,” Ranjitha said. “There's no reason for a human to really do that. What you want is a human to be able to understand what the major themes are; where they happen in the data; and then really figure out what are the actions to be taken to solve problems.”

She said there are so many exciting opportunities for using AI to help solve research problems. Consider the design process in its different stages, Ranjitha said, whether it’s discovery, ideation, prototyping, or deployment. “There’s always something you can do to make each of those parts of that design process easier and better.”

She sees AI helping create a more holistic design optimization flow to create better experiences for everyone’s end users.

“It's very striking that there's all of this work that we do that is called qualitative analysis, and then there's all of this work that other people do that is called quantitative analysis,” Ranjitha said. “But we're all trying to do the same thing, which is to optimize digital experiences. I think AI is that bridge between those two worlds, and that's what I'm excited for.”

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.