#46 AI & UX research
A silver bullet? Or not.
Mo here from the Bitcoin Design Community. Regular readers, thank you for your time. If you're new a warm welcome. I started my journey in working in Open Source bitcoin out of pure curiosity as well as the alignment with the ethos of bitcoin and what it provides to people. Fast forward a few years later have worked on some really nice projects and get to work every day with a bunch of very driven and unique people.
New to the Bitcoin Design Community? Its a great place to learn and explore and be curious.
There are no experts. Exploring one area long enough makes one more knowledgeable about that topic and everyone holds the capacity to learn and contribute.
And so kicking off with an open invitation to join and be active in the community. If you've been lurking...my Discord door is always open to convos.
The impact of AI on UX research & design
As we work and design and collaborate it’s clear that there are some AI tools that can support the research process. The key word being support as we are seeing that AI is still learning and with this learning phase there is a clear need for human verification as there are still errors in the data it produces.
There is no silver bullet and the below information is totally open for you to test yourself and verify. If there are some tips and tricks you’ve learnt please shoot them over, always happy to learn.
User interviews:
Want to test out your software and do usability tests or any form of interview?
Record the call and with the permission of the person you are speaking with and ask them if them for permission to upload it to an AI tool transcript tool.
Ask for consent:
May we upload this to a transcription tool?
May we upload the transcript to an AI tool to help with summarizing the insights?
Variation in consent:
The transcript is obtained from a public chat room/forum that is open to everyone. In this case it would make sense that its open for the public to read and so uploading that transcript to AI feels ethical since the data is already public.
Sorting through data:
This was a wonderful exercise that Christoph dove into last week, its always so good to learn from doing things practically yourself.
Many bitcoin wallets and open source products have Telegram groups which are open to the public.
Export: Export the conversions in a batch, ideally as a PDF
Discover: Chat with the data and ask AI to summarize the conversations.
Bucket: The AI tool can look for larger buckets and can also provide information as to what the most common questions are which are asked by users of the wallet. These larger questions can provide insight into which areas of the UI could be further developed to create and empower users in a position where they should not need to ask questions. The interface answers those questions for them.
ChatPDF helps with this.
Verify everything that AI provided by reading through the transcripts. Verification can be done by highlighting the transcript to verify if indeed it is true.
Also area that’s been a bit of a focus in the last week was Bitcoin Core App. Worked on getting the research page live which is super nice to see all of the past research efforts on Bitcoin Core App in one place.
Next to that also will continue to work on the AssumeUTXO's prototypes with Yashraj. We did a collaborative session in the community where we all learnt to prototype together and next we will summarize the design insights we had and then implement them into the prototype. Then test out the prototype on a few people. This is a great opportunity to test out designs before they move to development.
Also kicked off the Bitcoin Core App Case study. Its still very much in its early stages. However working in public and sharing work when it is in draft mode is also part of the process to allow the collective community to create together.
Open design and Open research.
Spent some time working on the newsletter with Christoph. Always a very smooth and quick process to get this one live. Its packed with a whole bunch of items that are going on in and around the community so well worth the read for a quick catch-up.
Also really happy to see the latest update of the Bitcoin Design Foundation website which is now live. Was once again great to collaborate with Daniel and Christoph in pushing these updates live, there were some copy updates as well as some testing of the website on various devices before it felt good to push it live.
The Foundation now has its "home" on the web and as the foundation grows and evolves so will the website. However it feels good that it has a location which is easily accessible to everyone.
Also had some nice calls later this week with Etta wallet as well as another design huddle and learning more about Covenants. Will share more about those next week.
Fun BESIGN design I was dabbling in during the design huddle today. In my brain this design has lightning channels and the lightning network as well as the lighting symbol :-)
Onto more learning, researching and designing.
Stay curious,
Mo.