People won't use your shiny new AI product
Hannah Beresford at UX Brighton 2024
About this talk
Incorporating AI into products is exciting, but what happens when real users start interacting with these features? Hannah Beresford has conducted extensive user testing on AI-driven functionalities and uncovered surprising behaviours. Using innovative testing techniques tailored specifically to AI features, she’s found that users often don’t respond to AI the way you’d expect.
In this talk, Hannah will share her discoveries, including unexpected insights into how people really behave when faced with AI and what that means for product design. If you’re working with AI, this talk will challenge your assumptions and provide practical tips for designing AI features that users will actually adopt.
About Hannah
Hannah Beresford is a Design Research Manager at Deloitte Digital, where she plays a key role in shaping AI-powered solutions used by thousands of people.
Her mission is to ensure that artificial intelligence enhances human experiences by addressing genuine user needs.As AI evolves, especially with the rise of Generative AI and its transition to more conversational interfaces, Hannah is dedicated to making these systems simpler, smarter, and more intuitive.
Her work centres on understanding how humans interact with AI and ensuring that these interactions feel natural and seamless.
Related reading
Books, research, ideas and people referenced in this talk.
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Projects and resources
- UK Government Service Manual03:05The Government Service Manual is the source of best-practice guidance that Hannah's conversational agent was designed to help product teams find.
- DPD chatbot incident14:11The DPD chatbot is cited as an AI product that swore at a customer after being launched without enough testing and guard rails.
- My AI14:22Snapchat's My AI is cited as a message-summarising feature whose ratings fell after users found it intrusive.
- ChatGPT23:49Hannah uses ChatGPT to emulate a hypothetical HR agent so that she can prototype and research a conversational experience.
Concepts
- Prompt engineering08:16Prompt engineering is the new skill Hannah says users are being expected to master before they can use conversational AI effectively.
- Service blueprints22:33Service blueprints are the artefacts Hannah questions when she asks whether teams need to create 28 of them or should rethink the method.
