It's Tuesday morning and my colleague asks if I want to write an article on AI research. My first thought here is. What exactly do I think about this? As a ux designer, I prefer to research qualitative data to find out what exactly the user wants. I classify AI as quantitative data. But is this a bad thing? I decide not. After all, we need quantitative data to see how the user currently interacts with a website or app. And AI makes me understand this ten times faster! Pure time savings. I currently see AI as a very valuable colleague.
But, how do I deploy colleague AI in the most useful way possible? Well that's a question I've been pondering for some time. What I know is that AI helps me in my research to quickly create insights and validate ideas. In this, AI is the supporting colleague. I use smart tooling that uses data from existing eye-tracking results, and then gets smarter through AI. This allows me to test for usability, focal points and accessibility (for example: https://vas.3m.com/, https://expoze.app/) at an early stage. Incidentally, I think it is important that when I use these toolings for heatmapping and improvement points, we should be transparent about this to our customers.
In addition, I always use at least two different tools because a good research always contains multiple sources this ensures that it is more reliable, even if this is AI. Why? You show connections between the different results and your own assumptions, this gives you a more balanced picture of the situation. This also provides a fuller understanding of the problem. Neatly, they also call this triangulation research "triangulation".
Striking results during research are for instance: use of colour, placement, use of photography and size. But sometimes, using multiple sources can also produce duplicate results. Like in a case where I tested a small difference with two banners. One banner had two colour fonts and the other one. In the one with two colour fonts, the heading stands out more than the call to action button. Logical, but so in the other banner, the call to action button stands out 15% more. Then I ask the question, "Which has higher priority? The CTA or the heading?" this I cannot decide but is a finding.