GoTo Foods

Pedro Canhenha, Director of UI/UX, GoTo Foods

Product Design Advisor

Rethinking How People Interact with Technology

The proliferation of articles on the topic of AI seems to be all around these days. Every time I turn around, there’s a new article or a new product released onto the market promising to revolutionize the way I take notes, or improve my work process, or even how I synthesize my thoughts.

Ironically enough, and thinking about the title of this article, I’ve been working across new product narratives since the early 2010s. I worked on Augmented Reality applications and also OCR product experiences, both aiming to expand the typical interaction models with users, simultaneously giving them more opportunities to get their tasks done more efficiently and with fewer error scenarios.

Years later, I was responsible, alongside a talented group of product professionals and various stakeholders, for the creation of a software package that incorporated LLMs. This solution aimed to automate the interpretation of large amounts of documents, in order to create a synthesized view of what those documents entailed, providing users with an actionable interaction that was more centered on analyzing that output, in order to provide the client with actionable reports and recommendations.

What originally took a plethora of analysts and various other professionals weeks and a considerable amount of hours has been decreased to a far more efficient and palatable scope of work, granting the organization an additional competitive edge.  

Keeping People at the Center of AI 

Curiously, across the examples I mentioned above, and even more recent ones that I’ve been involved in, including hackathons, one thing that has never been minimized centers around aspects of Human Centered Design. It is ever so tempting to brush aside a path of discovery and clarification of problem statements, since AI can synthesize and collect multiple points of view and build context, just by starting with a prompt within a form field.

 ​The more you understand your client, the better chances you have of delivering something they actually want and desire. 

However, when creating products, the focus should never be on the mechanism of accelerating the process, but rather commencing with the fundamentals of the problem statement itself. What is the point of accelerating a process if there’s no awareness of what is being solved, of what is being improved, and who ultimately benefits from all those improvements? 

Understanding Users before Building Solutions 

To better clarify a problem statement, be it in the shape of “Jobs to be Done”, or clarifying a Value Proposition, everyone involved in a product journey should be able to enumerate/list what the problem statement and opportunities are, and just as importantly, who are we solving the problems for? 

These journeys should never be a gratuitous exercise in leveraging technologies for the sake of using technologies. Still, instead of a lesson in accomplishing a better understanding of what clients/users say, think, want, feel, and in parallel, what they want to know, go, do, and also buy.  

The more you understand your client, the better chances you have of delivering something they actually want and desire. Human-centered Design also contemplates using an activity-centered systems approach, and finally, rapid iterations of prototypes and testing. 

Using AI without Losing Human Judgment 

AI can definitely make a healthy contribution to these chapters of this journey, provided, of course, that the professionals involved in these particular phases have a clear and discerning perspective which allows them to evaluate where the gaps exist, and what additional scenarios, limitations/constraints need to be taken into consideration. One of the principles of Interaction Design is tied to the concept of “Constraints”.

No product experience exists in a universe of boundless terrain. These opportunities are always tempered by the limitations that exist with audiences’ habits and expectations, technology virtuosity, and even data that can be leveraged to make the experience that much more desirable. Meaning: there has to be a convergence of a series of perspectives in order for a product journey to be a successful one.

Human-Centered Design/Thinking outlines a path where hopefully everyone understands the journey, what instruments/ mechanisms can be leveraged as an accelerator, and how results can be evaluated in a meaningful way.

There are plentiful opportunities for AI to play an enormous role on this path, provided the professionals involved realize that an unbalanced process delivers unbalanced outcomes. Teams can be efficient and technologically savvy, without discarding a thoroughly thoughtful process. It’s ultimately about finding a balance, much like a finely attuned instrument.