From my standpoint, I worry that the current path of AI development will reproduce systems that erase those of us on the margins, whether intentionally or not, through the mundane and relentless repetition of reductive norms structured by the matrix of domination .d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }1Muhammad Khurram(a concept we’ll return to later), in a thousand daily interactions with AI systems that, increasingly, weave the very fabric of our lives..d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }11

Consistency and standards is the idea that designs should minimize how many new concepts users have to learn to successfully use the interface. A good example of this is Apple’s Mac OS operating system, which almost mandates that every application support a small set of universal keyboard shortcuts, including for closing a window, closing an application, saving, printing, copying, pasting, undoing, etc.

If your design requires too much concentration to have someone think aloud while they’re using it (e.g., they’re playing a game), you can also record their interactions and then conduct a retrospective interview, having them reflect on the actions that they took while watching the recording. These recordings might just be the screen interactions, or they might also include the user’s context, facial expressions, or other details. Recording can also be useful for showing designers and engineers breakdowns, helping to persuade others in an organization that a design needs to be improved.

To help us think about this we can use the concepts of gulfs of execution and evaluation

Of course, after all of this discussion of making, it’s important to reiterate: the purpose of a prototype isn’t the making of it, but the knowledge gained from making and testing it. This means that what you make has to be closely tied to how you test it.

It is also important to ask only one question at a time. Questions that ask respondents to evaluate more than one concept (known as double-barreled questions) – such as “How much confidence do you have in President Obama to handle domestic and foreign policy?” – are difficult for respondents to answer and often lead to responses that are difficult to interpret. In this example, it would be more effective to ask two separate questions, one about domestic policy and another about foreign policy.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Learn from what has been tried and is currently in use, map it out in a competitive analysis, and leverage your findings to differentiate your solution from the competition. And if you are new to a particular vertical, i.e. financial technology, then a competitive analysis will be imperative to grow your understanding of the basic features and functions of a financial technology platform.

The critic in a critique must engage deeply in the substance of the problem a designer is solving, meaning the more expertise they have on a problem, the better. After all, the goal of a critique is to help someone else understand what you were trying to do and why, so they can provide their own perspective on what they would have done and why. This means that critique is “garbage in, garbage out”: if the person offering critique does not have expertise, their critiques may not be very meaningful.

However, most societies do not value creative thinking and so our skills in generating ideas rapidly atrophies, as we do not practice it, and instead actively learn to suppress it11 Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). Society, culture, and person: A systems view of creativity. Springer Netherlands. . That time you said something creative and your mother called you weird? You learned to stop being creative. That time you painted something in elementary school and your classmate called it ugly? You learned to stop taking creative risks. That time you offered an idea in a class project and everyone ignored it? You must not be creative. Add up all of these little moments and where most people end up in life is possessing a strong disbelief in their ability to generate ideas.

Some design scholars have questioned whether focusing on people and activities is enough to account for what really matters, encouraging designers to consider human values77 Friedman, B., & Hendry, D. G. (2019). Value sensitive design: Shaping technology with moral imagination. MIT Press. . For example, instead of viewing a pizza delivery app as a way to get pizza faster and more easily, we might view it as a way of supporting the independence of elderly who do not have the mobility to pick up a pizza on their own. Or, perhaps more darkly, instead of viewing TSA screening at an airport a way of identifying potential terrorists, we consider it through the value of power, as the screening process had more to do with maintaining political power in times of fear than it did with actually preventing terrorism. This shift in framing can enable designers to better consider the values of design stakeholders through their design process, and identify people they may not have designed for otherwise (e.g., people who are house bound because of injury, or politicians).

In a way, all of these skills are fundamentally about empathy55 Wright, P., & McCarthy, J. (2008). Empathy and experience in HCI. ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI). , because they all require a designer to see problems and solutions from other people’s perspectives, whether these people are users, other designers, or people in other roles, such as marketers, engineers, project managers, etc.