InVision Design Talks — The Future of Human-Computer Interaction with Irene Au

okay hi everyone thank you for joining design talks feature of UX design this is the fourth and final session in our week-long webinar series on trends shaping a field of UX my name is Chloe gray and I'm on the envision marketing team and I'm really excited to host today's webinar with I read out before we get started I want to go over a few housekeeping items so we'll have ten or so minutes at the end for Q&A so make sure to send your questions through the questions box or post them on Twitter um if you're posting on Twitter please use a hashtag hashtag design talks we're actually going to be giving away a free t-shirt a free envision t-shirt to one person who tweet it's their favorite insight or quote from the webinar using hashtag design talks so make sure you are sharing on social as well without further ado I'd like to introduce a speaker Irene Oh Irene is design partner at Khosla Ventures where she works with CEOs from early to late stage startups she is dedicated to raising the strategic value of design and user research within software companies through better methods practices processes leadership talent and quality previously Irene built and led the user experience design teams at Google Yahoo and Udacity and authored the definitive O'Reilly book design and venture capital Irene I'm gonna let you take it from here and turn on your video I'll just pass you the presenter mode okay great hi everybody we're just gonna do the handoff here yeah one sec okay hi everybody um so thanks for joining this morning just to recap so my name is Irina and I'm a design partner at coastal adventures and as Chloe mentioned I started my career at Netscape and went on to build the human centered design practices at Yahoo and google Udacity my background is in human-computer interaction and so I thought today I'd like to share with you kind of how the whole field has evolved and really been defined by advances made in computing technology so in order to see where we're going I just wanted to kind of go back to where we where we've come from and look at that evolution I'm going to turn off my video so that you can see the full screen hopefully this still works okay so what were the advances made in computing technology that have kind of defined human-computer interaction see so innovation in hardware and software has enabled us to interact with our computers in different ways and when we define new languages to invent with these innovations that's really the essence of human-computer interaction technological innovation is happening right now at such a pace that we can hardly wrap our minds around the long term implications for society ethics politics but but let's look at where we've been to see where we're going so in the early days of computers the first electronic computers used vacuum tubes as switches to represent and control the routing of this so here at the language that we use to interact with the computers was literally physical switches that were manipulated for computation these computers occupied entire rooms this is a photo of ENIAC which was among the earliest electrical general-purpose computers that was made this is another photo and I just want to note that most of the computer programmers at the time were women and this is how they programmed the computer we eventually moved from vacuum tubes to punch cards as a means of input into punch card computers which would execute the programs this is an example of such a computer that my own mother used to process payroll data and coding was literally done by hand on sheets like these which was still a physical endeavor and a manual process during this phase of computing the goal of human-computer interaction was simply to get the data processed we weren't interested in usability or desirability and then in the next phase there were three critical inventions that led to this next phase of computing really it was the transistor the integrated circuit and the microprocessor and these inventions enabled computers to be much smaller faster and cheaper and more efficient than the computers that were built with vacuum tubes and this began the trend towards miniaturization that continues to this day these inventions drove the birth of the personal computer the first personal computer was introduced in 1975 by IBM it had a 16 line by 64 character display that ran a computer language called basic and command-line interfaces where the primary means of interacting with computers first on terminals like these the deck vt100 and then later on PCs running UNIX and ms-dos the interface would consist of a command-line shell which would accept commands as text input and then convert the commands into corresponding operating system functions the advances made in computing technology created an opportunity for people to interact with computers in a different way we moved away from physically manipulating bits to interacting with computers in a digital space on screen and then with the invention of the mouse by Doug Engelbart and the graphical user interface or GUI this revolutionized HCI and it was really during this phase that the field was born early attempts at graphical user interfaces were still morphic and literally tried to replicate the physical world even in its most inefficient ways the most successful style of interaction design has been what we refer to as wind which stands for windows icons menus pointer wimp interfaces are so ubiquitous that this is really what comes to mind when we think of the term graphical user interface although not all GUI czar wimped systems so in the previous slide I showed you these are screenshots from general magics magic cap interface and you can imagine like if you need to send an email you need to sit at a desk if you need to go access some application you go into the hallway to get into a different room horribly inefficient and really didn't work for people the the language of HCI in a whimp world is direct manipulation complete with nouns which are represented by icons and verbs which are represented by menu items and buttons and with a GUI and a mouse people could under up they could operate under a paradigm of hey you icon go there into that folder or app and that was really the mental model that was established the Macintosh which exemplified the ideal GUI launched in 1984 with principles that emphasized directness user control and real-world metaphor the goal of HCI at this time was to leverage the pre-existing paradigms of the physical world without taking it too far and make it user friendly now with smartphones the birth of the iPhone and the Android based smartphones put the power of computing in everyone's pocket and by using our fingers instead of a mouse direct manipulation is even more direct than with a whimp interface we swipe to scroll we literally drag objects by dragging our fingers it's still direct manipulation but the language has evolved to meet the form and capabilities of the computing device and with the power of once used what what once used to be a supercomputer now in the palm of your hand we're able to enable people to access computing technology from anywhere now whereas in the first phase of computing we were bringing the physical world into a digital space sensors enable us to use natural movement to bring a digital world into a physical space the Xbox Kinect made playing video games a physical endeavor the Fitbit digitized our physical activity ring allows us to talk to visitors at our door even when we're not at home and nest made our thermostats smarter by adapting to our usage patterns in the home I'd like to highlight a few more companies that are doing interesting work in this area particularly in health tech so there's a company called siren care that has created smart socks that use temperature sensors to detect inflammation in real time for diabetics diabetes patients are prone to foot swelling and it can lead to infection or amputation if the foot is not checked so with siren care they we've conductive thread into the fabric of the sock to detect when there's inflammation and all that information is then uploaded to an app on your smartphone to alert you if there's an issue a live core offers a mobile fda-cleared EKG monitor targeted towards patients who have atrial fibrillation afib patients have an irregular and often rapid heart rate that can increase their risk of stroke heart failure and other heart related complications a life court offers two ways for people to monitor their heart they have kardia mobile which is an attachment for your phone and cardia watch which is a replacement wristband for your Apple watch a notification is sent to the user to record an EKG if the heart rate appears inconsistent with the user's activity level now theoretically it could go further all the data is stored in the cloud and a live core can mine all that user data to make predictions based on what they see so for example if your EKG reading mimics the pattern seen in other patients hours before they have a heart attack a live core could alert you to the danger and advise you to take necessary precautions to avoid the heart attack so as computing moves beyond screens beyond devices with screens the language of HCI similarly evolves how do you design without a screen as we bring the digital world into a physical space how do we deal with the ethical and privacy issues surrounding constant instrumentation and mass collection of personal data as sensors become ubiquitous we increasingly track every aspect of our lives we may reach a point where computers know more about us than we know about ourselves already researchers have been able to successfully infer what kind of personality a user has just based on their keyboard and mouse use and another team has shown how just by looking at mouse cursor motions they can read the users emotions already Google and Facebook algorithms know exactly how you feel and countless other things about you that you may not even suspect Facebook only needs ten likes from you to outperform predictions from work colleagues about your preferences personality and dispositions and if you have clicked three hundred likes on your Facebook account the Facebook algorithm can predict your opinions and desires better than your own life partner now as much as we need government regulation to help consumers protect their data and privacy the cat is kind of out of the bag and even if tech companies change their financial models governments will use these same techniques to monitor and control their citizens imagine if some company or government entity read every email text message or post that we ever wrote every photo we ever took and combine that with knowledge of our heart rate blood pressure hormone levels all in real time as we move through everyday life this entity would be better equipped to tell us how to vote what to choose how to spend our time far beyond what we consciously are aware and in the same way that we relied less on our sense of direction and navigation because we have GPS we may decide to stop listening to our own feelings and start listening to these external algorithms instead and this could lead to a scenario where algorithms would be better equipped to kind of vote based on your behalf instead of having elections in China the government is testing a new way of social control that ranks citizens based on their social and financial behavior this is an example of the facial recognition system used there the social credit system uses facial recognition to evaluate individuals day to day behavior and generate a credit score for each person so that minor violations like jaywalking or jump at the transit ticket line could decrease one's social credit score in the system thereby making it difficult to get a loan or travel abroad and even manspreading on the subway in Beijing might reduce one Social Credit under a new proposal that's being considered but it's not just China that's using technology to create an authoritarian state with surveillance in the u.s. gaggle a company that sells and creates products for schools screen students electronic documents communications and calendars for things like bullying violence and suicidal ideation and the ACLU and the ESF have expressed concern that surveillance leads to false identification of students as safety threats which exposes them to harm and an erosion of civil and intellectual liberties a strict privacy laws in the u.s. may protect us from this black mirror inspired future but conversely they may also hinder us from making the best predictions for customers when it comes to making decisions around our health based on a genetic database and since this is all based on statistics the size of a company's database is key to making accurate predictions so in this sense Chinese disregard for privacy may actually give them an advantage in the area of health and medicine over the u.s. now AI researchers and robot asses are testing the limits of how much machines can learn to mimic and respond to human emotion these are the big questions the world of HCI seeks to answer now how do you get a machine to think and act like a human in 2011 Apple ruled out Siri and Google now launched in 2012 marking the beginning of a new phase where apps use natural language to answer people's questions we now have fast none of computers and data where we can actually train large neural networks and as we train them with more and more data the performance approves improves accordingly in 2015 a 31 year old man named Roman mother ANCA died while crossing the street in Moscow and his death was a devastating loss for his best friend Jan Yokota and at the time Jenna had been building a messenger bot that could do things like make restaurant reservations when Roman died she fed her text messages that she had exchanged with Roman into a neural network and created a bot in his likeness and as a memorial to her friend could have replicated his personality and could talk to him again via a chat bot and thus this company called replica was born this chat bot uses a deep learning model which learns to mimic how humans speak in order to simulate conversation the version of replica that exists today is used by people who seek emotional support it's not a substitute for Siri or Alexa or Google assistant people are using replicas to talk about their feelings in their lives what does it mean to be human when we have technology like this our organisms just algorithms and is life really just about data processing is consciousness valuable what about love or human connection what kinds of relationships do we want to have with machines are they our friends are they our assistants are they sentient beings are they meant to be a long horse or pleasure partner what is the role of the machine and what is the role as a human as machines are increasingly trained to think and act like humans their abilities surpass ours and many of the startups I work with are using human users to train the machine learning algorithms so the machines can do the same work much faster at a much larger scale and as this technology becomes realized the goal of HCI is no longer even a goal unto itself but a goal to be removed in fact one of the executives I worked with boldly proposed a quarterly no you my goal where the goal would be to launch at least one feature per quarter that requires no human user let's talk about augmented reality and virtual reality these systems to date are still mostly concerned theis much like the personal computer was in the 1970s before useful software was invented right now augmented reality is mostly used for specialized applications like flying a drone or for business use such as on the factory floors or in the operating room but there is increasing consensus that artificial that augmented reality will be the next new platform in computing in these contexts of use the goal of HCI is to connect the physical world with the virtual world how might this data on demand overlaid on top of the physical world help people do their jobs more effectively how might these systems be designed so that they can be used in a hands-free environment the software for AR and VR systems continue to evolve and thus the language for interacting with them varies but all of them leverage natural human movement mediated by a screen and sensors and whereas AR aims to connect the physical world with the virtual world VR aims to bring humans into the virtual world virtual reality stands to occupy people's time and attention either as entertainment or as an escape from reality or both and in worlds where robots have taken over most jobs virtual worlds may be the place where people seek a sense of meaning and purpose for their lives with current AR and VR interfaces the user sees the world through a screen and the computer overlays an interface on top of that view I'm particularly intrigued by the converse where a computer that can see and understand your movement can augment your experience of the real world without a screen so for example there at home workout in devices like mirror which is on the left and tonal which is on the right here they currently stream workouts at home but imagine if these devices were equipped with sophisticated computer vision where they would be able to see the user working out and coach the user on their form and tailor exercises for them I believe experiences like these are more representative of augmented reality interfaces where your regular everyday experiences are in half by computing technology that is ambient it can see you it can hear you and it can communicate back to you maybe not even necessarily with the screen now no other invention has the potential to radically change human-computer interaction than brain computer interfaces today all the interaction with a computer is done via a device between you and the technology whether it's a mouse keyboard joystick screen or sensor or microphone by removing the device and directly decoding the signals from our brains to devices we break through to a new kind of interaction between humans and machines there's one company called control labs that is doing just that the first thing they want to fix is the experience of texting on phones imagine not needing a keyboard to enter text into a machine what if we could send a message to our loved ones from or Pacus with our hands still in our pockets at MIT Media Lab there's a project called alter ego in which electrodes attached to your jaw and face pick up neuromuscular signals triggered when you say words in your head so just thinking about saying those words triggers the device and the device can understand what the user wants to communicate and can talk back to the user via bone conduction making it possible to interact with a computer or a digital assistant or AI without ever having to speak aloud or fiddle with a smartphone it's kind of interesting that they've chosen to detect the brain signals of the thought around speech rather than the thoughts themselves this was a deliberate choice that they made to protect the users privacy and just last week a team at UCSF announced that they have found a way to decode brain signals into speech giving voice to paralyzed people it's a step towards a system that would let people send texts straight from their brains the proof that you are seeing is saying we'll only lose there is literally no interaction with a machine today whether it's a phone a computer a robot that this technology doesn't ultimately turn side down we often engage in research around human augmentation with the goal of curing disease or helping the sick or disabled for example alter-egos creator envisions his technology to be used by paraplegics are those stricken with ALS but momentous inventions are never restricted in its used to only healing inevitably they're used to upgrade normal healthy humans as well human-computer interaction then becomes human computer integration and we may very well see the beginning of a new superhuman caste or a class of people who have access to this technology while others do not and while the thought of a superhuman cast that is altered through nanotechnology and brain computer interfaces can be troubling at this moment we may think if only we could be so lucky as to use technology to help people realize their greatest potential but instead the combination of advertising based business models online social systems overwhelming AI have kind of exploited the worst sides of human nature and led to the downgrading of human behavior and humanity we have seemingly separate problems such as tech addiction teen depression shortening attention spans political polarization the breakdown of truth outrage if ocation of culture the rise of influencer culture these are all actually not really separate issues they're all related these companies have gotten really good at understanding how humans interact with computers and they have figured out how to exploit human nature for their financial gain now in the early days of human-computer interaction and human factors we study we focused on studying the individual human we looked at physiology emotions attention perception and cognition and through human centered design we have figured out how to extract attention from people for company's financial gain we've learned how to manipulate people's beliefs and worldviews and now we're reckoning with what we've built and human centered design is no longer enough the problem with human centered design is that understanding the individual human is not enough we also need to protect what we can't see we need shift from human centered design humans that are designed to humane center design so what does it mean for design to be humane centered that means the design is characterized by compassion and sympathy for people especially for the suffering or the distressed we act in a manner that causes the least amount of harm to humans with humane centric design we go beyond the individual human and into how people relate to each other and how that ecosystem works as a whole we go beyond human physiology emotions attention perception and cognition and consider more broadly how the individual human relates to other people in society as a whole such as sense making decision making social reasoning group dynamics and social environment historically we have viewed AI systems as passive tools that can be assessed purely through their technical architecture performance and capabilities increasingly we are seeing the rise of machines that have their own agency machines that are actors making decisions and taking actions autonomously as a result they are active actors that have their own behavioral patterns and ecology as they change and influence their environments and people and machines around them we need to acknowledge that we are all one giant human machine system and started studying it that way humans and algorithms are both actors and they both relate to each other so for example a machine behaviorist might study the impact of voice assistance on a child's personality development or they might look at how online dating algorithms have changed how people meet and fall in love or they might look at the efficacy of mobile apps and their ability to treat depression without a human intervention ultimately this area study would investigate the emergent properties that arise from many humans and machines coexisting and collaborating together now you may be wondering what you personally can do given the advances in technology and the dominant role it plays in our lives first as this is mostly an audience of designers the champion and agent for humane centered design we need to consider not only how individuals interact with technology but how the human machine system affects humanity as a whole as we design and develop products and experiences and for individuals B&O should be aware that the notion of free will is a fallacy we believe that we're acting freely without understanding that we are prone to manipulation in ways that we may not be consciously aware of so know thyself as now you're in competition with AI that may be developed by governments or companies that know you better than you think you know yourself or that you believe that you know yourself as consumers in a capitalist society we help decide what is work using what is worth our time and attention we all own that and a simple thing that you can do is just to be intentional about where your attention goes take a few breaths anytime you're transitioning from one activity to another when you're using technology Linda stone coined a term called email apnea which refers to the common occurrence of people not being aware of how they're breathing when they're checking email it happens so use this moment of pausing and taking a breath to check in with yourself ask yourself how you're feeling and whether this is actually how you really want to be spending your time okay thank you thanks everyone that was awesome we can move into the Q&A portion let's just turn on my camera and you can turn on your camera as well that was really great super interesting we have a lot of good questions and feel free to continue to send questions into the questions box so first question do you believe that free and open source projects have a potential to be more humane centered than classic business driven companies um potentially because it's built by the people for the people theoretically um so there is sort of a wisdom in the crowd also but the one thing I would worry about is that the people contributing to open source are generally as it is now a pretty homogeneous population and so there is the potential for bias to be built in those systems even if they're open-source projects because not necessarily all populations are contributing to the creation of this open-source project so that would be one thing I would be really conscious and aware of and you mentioned some really interesting concerns that could come about as we continue to blend with technology and blend technology into our lives and someone asks like if you could someone else here like could you just give a maybe like a summary of the top five things that you think people need to be aware of and really cognizant of as we keep advancing with human-computer interaction and do you agree with Nick Bostrom's views and worries about human computer singularity mm-hmm I think that would be a while before that happens I think we're kind of overestimating how quickly that change is going to happen I think the more immediate concerns right now that I think everybody should be aware of are things like bias even the top AI researchers and scientists they will say that the first thing they worry about every single day is bias and how to build systems that because you know because the way these systems are trained is that they're taking data from before and in putting that into training system and so naturally there's gonna be some bias in there but so how do you create these systems so that they're they're trained based on past data but also not inherently building in whatever stereotypes and biases that we perceive so that's one I think another more immediate issue is really an issue around attention and where we're placing it so this is for the individual there's the other which is companies and even some government entities that are manipulating how people are behaving and for the in the case of the companies there is a financial incentive for them to do so and so we may need like new fiduciary models to incentivize companies to kind of align what they're doing with how people really want to live and behave in the meantime like what we've seen now is we're reckoning with a rise in teenage suicide and depression pervasive sense of loneliness polarization all these things are related to the fact that these algorithms are kind of trained to serve up content that gets clicks and the things that get clicks are the things that are like most provocative most polarizing most controversial most salacious and so yes we need some regulation and we need the companies to take charge but it is sort of like an arms race and so there's only so much the companies can do as long as this is kind of my model they have so it's really then incumbent upon individuals to pay attention to how they're spending their time and like how many of us have kind of gotten ourselves lost into the universe of the internet where you click on one link and then on another and another and then you and death watching some videos and the next thing you know you've just burned a couple of hours playing video games or watching videos or reading stuff on the internet so we need to build an awareness around that there's also the issue of privacy so that's the the third big issue that I think is more immediate is individual's data protection right now most of our data is owned either by companies in the case of the US or by the government in the case of China and so like you know is that a good thing should consumer protections be put in place to protect our privacy and like I said in the presentation the cat is sort of out of the bag like even if you have regulation of these companies trees will figure out how to do this as they have and it's sort of an arms race it's like even if you have companies or countries saying well we're the good guys we're going to protect user privacy and data and we're not gonna use this to monitor people or to serve up that content or things like that there will be other countries or entities that will do it and so it's it's you know for things like human augmentation synthetic biology nanotechnology brain computer interfaces like this is gonna happen it's not gonna be stopped and it will become a reality and in that sense it's sort of like a nuclear arms race and so it really requires global cooperation and consciousness across all of humanity to come to terms like what-what is really within bounds and what what is what are we going to pledge to do and not do to preserve humanity in the same way that there were there was mass collaboration cooperation across countries around nuclear disarmament it's kind of in the same situation now thank you rianne's there neo some great questions coming in here so thanks everyone who's sharing these a couple of people asked about the right way to get corporations on board with humans under design and how how can we balance or kind of gets empathy and compassion to take presidents of our profits and market share if you know it seems like they might be competing interests how can we get those to work together in my work with startups conversation that first of all the venture capital firm that I work for very rarely invests in companies that make money off of advertisement advertisements I mean sometimes it happens but usually the focus is on creating some service that is of value that people would be willing to pay for and so that obviates the need for you know this race to the bottom of the brainstem where and you know you serve up content that gets people click on stuff and your extracting attention from people so the first thing I would say is like try to explore alternative ways to make money and create a sustainable business that also offers value to people and I'm hopeful because whereas in the early days of the internet that the expectation was that everything would be free increasingly we're seeing high value services that people are willing to pay for so increasingly people are willing to pay for high quality software you know like people are willing to pay for like Spotify Netflix you know these are content delivery platforms that are by subscription and the quality is so much higher than the the free kind of models so so that would be one is to explore alternative fiduciary incentives for companies and I think that's really key the second advice I would piece of advice I would give is to really invest in user research I there are larger companies that have certainly invested a lot in user research but when I work with startups this is one of the most underinvested functions that can really pay off for a company and be like rocket fuel in delivering insights to companies around what's the best way forward there's nothing like bringing the voice of the user and insights about people to life inside a company that can motivate an engineering and part development team to move in a certain direction or another so and again it's not you know it's not just about doing the research but if nobody hears it and if nobody really understands it then it didn't really happen so one of the biggest challenges around research is not necessarily just around doing it but it's also about communicating it back to the organization in a way that's really effective and and heard great and none this one is about skill set so if if one is currently immersed in an industry that largely involves user facing interfaces how can position themselves as designer to adapt to the future of human-computer interaction as it becomes less UI oriented hmm I don't think that user interfaces are going to go away completely I do think that the nature of design work may evolve this has already started to happen over the past several years as like for example when when the internet when we started having web browsers and websites and web applications like this had never been designed before and people had to figure out what's the best way to design web applications or websites that would be useful for people and there was a lot of user research done around that and then eventually we developed guidelines and then there was like a shared mind around what a what create what constitutes a usable web site and how do you get there and then when smartphones came out same thing happened the design of mobile applications and websites on mobile devices is kind of all over the place and then eventually it kind of converged and now when you look across the design of mobile apps there's a pretty standard way of offering functionality there are only so many ways you can offer a button or menu but a bunch of icons things like that and in the same way I think it's new technology comes on board we're going we'll figure it out as we go now this whole push to maybe remove the UI altogether as I said in my presentation what happened there was that it shifted the activities of the designers to be more like facilitators of the experience so they weren't necessarily designing screens or wireframes but they were leading the cross-functional development team through a journey of understanding the end user and what their goals were what was motivating them and what would make them feel really amazing in their jobs because it's an enterprise company and then taking those insights back to the product managers and the engineers and and then through those insights the engineers came up with the ideas around how to autumn certain features and when would be the right touch points for involving humans to approve whatever the machines were doing things like that and then and then building it from there so it wasn't like the designers didn't have jobs but the nature of what the designers were doing evolved it was really about understanding people bringing those insights back and then facilitating cross-functional collaboration around what's the best way machines can support users in their efforts to meet their goals um we have time for two more questions so how do you recommend that we design for Humanity when creating something novel where the impact on humanity may be unclear for example at the very start of social media I would guess it was not initially clear how it could eventually affect so many aspects of life like depression or attention or cyberbullying now and I think it's really not feasible or practical to try to anticipate every single possible outcome whenever any kind of new technology is rolled out there's a process of learning as you go for any kind of new endeavor but I think that the moment we begin to see and understand that there are mass impacts like companies have to take responsibility and I think that's where we've seen some companies fall short because they have defined their success in certain kinds of terms and metrics and it's a lot easier to stay the course especially when things are going really well to kind of focus on user growth or engagement or time spent things like that especially for media companies these are very classic ways that media companies have measured themselves even predating the internet like radio stations and TV stations have kind of measured themselves in this way and so you know I think going back to my earlier comment like we need to look at what are the financial incentives like whenever a company's is created they should think about where's their money coming from how are they making and are their success metrics aligned with human success metrics and if not maybe that's a chance to kind of re-evaluate what are we building and is there a chance to like push ourselves to do something even better and so that's where it's one thing to like make stuff and experiment and put stuff out and see how it's received and define it but as like as a start-up becomes a company and even as a company matures I think it is incumbent upon the leadership to kind of take another look at how they evaluate success so like just somethings as an example when I worked at Udacity we had enormous debates about whether to allow people to move together as a cohort where everybody starts and ends of course at the same time versus let everybody work at their own pace and a very common metric for massive online open courseware at that time was completion rate and and that was kind of like how Coursera Udacity udemy all of these companies would measure themselves and brag about engagements and things like that we knew from our own internal logs and then also from looking at what other MOOCs were doing that when you move people through as a cohort where there's a definite start and end time for everybody that the completion rate would be higher and and so there was a strong argument for creating cohorts within the Udacity experience but our founder Sebastian Thrun felt really strongly that we should support an experience where people can move at their own pace because there are a lot of people using Udacity courses who were working full-time and they were taking these classes at night there were people who just were high school students and we're learning at a different rate than people who were like mid-career professionals and he wanted to create an experience that would support all those kinds of users and so ultimately it came to a point where he as the founder and CEO said I am willing to sacrifice a high completion rate for being able to offer an experience that is asynchronous and you know we could have created an experience either way we could have moved people through as a cohort or we could have created an a secret learning experience but what was important was that we decided on a certain path and that we were very valued we were very principled about it we knew why we were doing it and that the founder the CEO is making these deliberate trade-offs on the success metrics and maybe redefining what defines success maybe it's maybe you shouldn't be completion rate maybe you should be something else like your ability to find a job that ultimately led to that path so that's just a very specific example of how we put that into practice great and can you share some tips or your favorite resources for learning about humane centered design where you recommend people go if they are either starting from zero or it's something to just want to brush up on or should they or should they start there's no brushing up because it's still emerging and it's just being defined now and it's really a term that's being coined and put out there in into people's consciousness so it's again we're making it up as we go I would say the organization that's probably on the forefront of offering thought leadership for this really is Tristen Harris's Center for humane design and interestingly his co-founder aza Raskin is the son of Jeff Raskin who was one of the inventors of the Macintosh and and Jef Raskin wrote this text book called the the humane interface so that was kind of come full circle there I think that people really need to invest in design research and not just high usability testing but really kind of a call for studying like using methods employed by psychologists sociologists anthropologists emphasis to study the ecosystem the people and how they work with each other and collaborate and make decisions and how they think and again I said this is like the most underinvested area that I see many companies have if they have it at all and it's something that I think is incumbent upon every company to invest in even if they don't have user researchers maybe it means that the product are doing this research or designers but everybody kind of needs to invest in this there are emerging academic kind of research groups that are looking at this and I would say Stanford and MIT are on the forefront of this so at MIT there are now researchers coming together to study the human-machine system and at Stanford we have the Center for forget what they call it exactly the Center for humane AI or something like that led by Fei Fei Li so these are really the two institutions that I look to to see the you know where is the cutting-edge research you know that's happening same thing with things like brain machine interfaces I see that really happening at MIT and Stanford as well great thank you those are some really good tips so that's all the time we have for questions so thanks everyone for attending today and thank you every this is a great presentation we all really learned a lot we will send out a recording of this presentation next week so definitely keep an eye out for that in your inboxes and I hope everyone has a great day

Channel: InVision

Views: 4,520

Keywords: Design webinar, ux webinar, ux design, future of ux, design expert

Id: xZyt2ADdUzA

Length: 45min 34sec (2734 seconds)

Published: Tue May 07 2019