The Thoughts & Feelings of AI

📰 3 DESIGN ARTICLES

Can AI Truly Read Feelings?

• Product Design Tetiana Sydorenko takes an insightful dive into emotion recognition AI, a feature that interprets human emotions from things like facial expressions and vocal tones, highlighting where potential accuracy issues and ethical concerns may lie.
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• Differences such as culture, race, or disabilities may impact the way AI technology interprets certain movements or expressions, and accuracy relies on collecting large amounts of biometric data, sparking conversations about privacy and transparency of use.
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• “Humans don’t express emotions in a universal, one-size-fits-all way. And yet, most emotion recognition systems operate under that flawed assumption, reducing complex human experiences into a set of predefined labels.”

Thinking Like AI: A New Approach to AI UX Design at Microsoft

• Michael O’Sullivan, Senior UX Researcher at Microsoft, explores a new AI integration approach in UX by empathizing with AI, detailing a workshop where participants tried to adopt an AI's perspective to better utilize its functionalities.
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• The thought experiment aims to optimize design processes and AI interactions, ultimately enhancing the user experience for humans and creating a more seamless and productive process working with AI agents.
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• “If we want our AI features and autonomous agents to navigate our products as effectively and efficiently as our human users do (leveraging the right data, surfacing the right insights, etc.), perhaps we should also think about AI’s jobs-to-be-done, motivations, pain points and preferences.”

How to Retain Customers When They're Being Driven Elsewhere

• This case study explores the functionality of reminder-style notifications, specifically through the lens of booking a flight, and how different companies approach the same problem of nudging users to make a purchase.
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• Oversaturation of notifications, confusing calls to action, and unnecessarily added friction are examined over a variety of booking platforms, breaking down how each UX pain point can lead to user inaction or churn.
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• “You don’t just lose customers to price, you lose them to hesitation. Search engines and AI tools deliver answers instantly, without needing a click… Conversion rates and retention are more critical than ever—not just keeping existing customers, but preventing undecided travelers from bouncing back to Google—where a competitor’s “better” offer is waiting.”

💜 PORTFOLIO INSPIRATION

William Dockery, a UX Academy graduate, showcases an eye for detail in his end-to-end design for shipping company City Logistic Services, thoughtfully using color changes and shifts in CTAs to bring striking new branding coupled with a more effective user experience. With his designs for event planning app Hubble, he uses a strong understanding of user research to craft a clean and visually compelling end result that appeals to user needs.

Got a portfolio you love that you’d like to share with our audience? Email your suggestions to hello@designlab.com.

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People don’t use a product because of the great design; great design helps them use the product. — Viran Anuradha Dayaratne (designer)

🧪 FROM THE LAB

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