UX needs a sense of urgency about AI

“UX professionals must seize the AI career imperative or become irrelevant”, writes Jakob Nielsen in his blog UX Tigers, particularly with current AI-driven tools being “far from user-friendly with their clunky, prompt-driven interfaces”, and with adult (digital) literacy being what it is.

“UX folks are trapped in complacency while the AI techquake radically shakes up the computing landscape. We witnessed similar complacency during the dot-com revolution. It is high time we shake off inertia, embrace AI design, and prevent engineers from monopolizing the new UI paradigm.” […]

‘The lessons from the dot-com saga signal that engineering-biased and marketing-fueled designs yield subpar user experiences. Businesses might see some productivity gains, but these fall far short of the potential benefits from a user-centric design approach for the slew of industry-specific AI tools to be rolled out in the next 2–3 years. Meanwhile, users will be the victims of shoddy design.”

The post dates from mid-June, but Nielsen comes back to the topic in his post UX Angst of 2023 of just a few days ago:

“We also need more UX work to improve enterprise AI and domain-specific AI implementations. It’ll be a year or two before the need for this UX effort dawns on most business executives, but the light will come.”