Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized various fields with its generative capabilities. Design is no exception, as AI continues to have a significant impact on the user-centered design (UCD) process. This presentation explores how AI is reshaping the UCD process, presenting designers with significant opportunities to enhance creativity and productivity, while also posing challenges and potential pitfalls for Human Factors designers and practitioners.

One area where AI is transforming the UCD process is in user research. It offers novel tools and methods for data collection and analysis, enabling the processing of vast amounts of data from diverse sources. This facilitates the extraction of meaningful insights that inform design decisions, including the development of user personas, scenarios, journey maps, and other design artifacts.

Another aspect of AI’s impact on the UCD process is seen during the design phase. Integration of AI tools introduces new avenues for ideation and prototyping. Designers benefit from AI-generated ideas and feedback based on data and design criteria. AI also serves as a co-creator by generating designs incorporating text, images, audio, video, animations, and code.

In the test and evaluation phase, AI plays a crucial role in generating scripts that simulate interactions between users and prototypes. This enables quick and cost-effective testing and validation of ideas. Natural language processing (NLP) can be employed to understand users’ sentiments expressed in text or speech, while computer vision can recognize users’ faces, gestures, and actions from images or videos.

However, designing with AI also presents significant challenges and risks for designers. AI systems are complex and dynamic, which can lead to unpredictable behavior. Therefore, designers must prioritize usability, trustworthiness, explainability, and ethics when working with AI systems. Addressing ethical considerations such as ownership, accountability, and transparency of AI-generated designs is essential. Furthermore, designers must ensure that algorithmic models are unbiased. Developing and adapting data literacy and computational thinking skills are crucial for designers to collaborate effectively and responsibly leverage AI inclusively.