Almost every project in the employee experience space is very much AI-driven on the transformation side. And of course, we're building plugins and extending it, and we're doing all sorts of work where we're solution-ing and doing UX work on top of it. I really thought it'd be a great opportunity to talk about that subject today with you and share that more broadly in this community.
I'm going to start with, I think, one of the more interesting areas. We were actually just talking about this idea that one of the reasons AI is so compelling isn't just the post-generative AI era and this new stack of capabilities. It's that the data is so much richer now, the data we have for indirect and direct feedback.
You were explaining that a little bit to me. I'd love to, if you could just share a little bit more with everyone else around. What is AI doing for UX and EX in data and analytics?
It seems like there's a new AI tool or feature that's coming out every day, and it's a really exciting time to be in terms of user experience design.
When it comes to analyzing data, there are a lot of different ways AI is helping. As you know, there's just so much data out there, vast amounts of information, and it can get overwhelming.
As a designer has someone working with data and knowing, is good data or not good data? So we can use it to analyze some of the feedback there is.
I've seen AI being used for sentiment analysis, so we're getting feedback from a critique or a design or even feedback from a customer. I like this. I don't like this about the design.
AI can go in and based on the sentiment, the tone of the writing, it can give us those insights really quickly. And like you said, there's that indirect data that we're getting from, like things like Viva Insights and usage data, and then we have that direct data. So those two different forms, like you were saying? Yeah, that, you know, the direct data is an interesting one, you know, like feedback in a Viva Glint survey or something.
How do we act on it from an employee experience perspective or feedback on your Internet homepage? One of the things that I find interesting is we have some data that's kind of a blend of both.
Heat maps and things like that might be indirect data, but an example that comes to my mind is, and I know it's such an expensive thing, is like recording, right? So you do screen recordings or used to sit behind people. I know we used to do that. We'd sit behind people as they click and figure out where's that. What does the employee journey look like?
When they're looking for something, they go here, they go there. And it's easy to record it now, but it's actually tricky to process that. You have to pull in people like yourself or whoever to like, look at those patterns. Are you seeing changes there? On the AI front? Yes.
In terms of analytics and user behaviour, we're seeing tools like clarity come to the forefront that are taking all that information, how users are interacting and clicking on your app or your website and where they're most interested, which we can take those insights and then design experiences around that.
Taking all this information, there's lots of it coming at us, and we can quickly and easily see a summary of that. We don't have to stand behind someone's shoulder and see, well, how would you do this task? Does this, is this task easy for you to do?
We can even ask AI, like, does this make sense? Or how are these measurements in terms of comparing to other sites? And it can come back and give us recommendations too.
I know you demonstrated to me a little while ago that capability and clarity where you have those recordings and the data is locked in video format, but we can convert it to text and then rationalize it. It was neat seeing this idea that you can connect these different experiences.
Well, let's talk about the way it accelerates things then a little bit more, because what we're finding is obviously the demand is increasing. We need new employee experience expectations that really require a lot more agility. They require organizations to move faster and not just enable things like Copilot for Microsoft 365, but enable AI experiences on top of what they already have and more. Creating designs is something that is always challenging.
There's the tax that you pay for trying to come up with predicting what people need. There's that insight that you brought up earlier, understanding what are we learning from the data we have today. What are we learning from the experiences that people have today? I'd love it if you could talk a little bit more about how are you yourself also keeping up with AI and how is it affecting that iterative process for design.
Yeah, absolutely. We're using AI to help with our prototyping efforts. It has really increased the time of delivery. So our speed has improved, has been quicker. We can rapidly test different ideas, different layouts, and different versions of a design really quickly.
One of the things that I really like using AI for is giving feedback or critiquing a design or a user experience, asking it, how would you improve this? How can we make this experience better? And then it can come back with a bunch of different suggestions, some really good ones, some like, I never thought of it that way, and maybe we need to think about it this way in terms of the design and the user experience.
So again, great for feedback, great for iterating and prototyping. We're seeing different tools come out that will generate those. Again, not always perfect, but really quick results, speeding up our delivery at the end of the day, which is nice.
And that goes hand in hand with like, brainstorming. We can get some really good new ideas or fresh perspectives in terms of our designs that way, and how we prototype, things at the end of the day. Yeah, I think it's really interesting, you know, uh, it both affects you individually, right?
Because it gives you that freedom to be creative and say, like, okay, I was going to write this, but, you know, do you have any suggestions on how I should rewrite it? Or same thing with you, I'm sure you do designs, and then the other side that's interesting is as a group, you know, you have like, well, let's just use it to come up with brainstorm ideas and review that. You know, we use it in meetings all the time, right?
Between transcription and those things. As well as I just love the whiteboarding capabilities. I never really used whiteboard, I'll be honest, in Teams meetings as much.
And now that I can just say Copilot, generate a bunch of sticky notes for something, it feels much more accessible so it's been really cool.
As we start to think about the next steps, one of the big ones that we had on our agenda for the next meeting, at least that we were thinking about doing, is around analytics and sort of this idea of taking that data, not just making it more accessible, which I think we kind of talked about today.
There are a lot of accessibility pathways, not just literally accessibility as a standard, but more like making things more accessible to more people. There's also this idea of how you communicate and craft good experiences, especially EX experiences around data and analytics. I think that's what we're planning for our next kind of deeper dive on our UX to EX episode.
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