Hyped but Invisible: Good UX and Good Gender Practices In and Out of the Conversational AI Sandbox
Elizabeth Rodwell
Practicing Anthropology, 2024
User Experience (UX) Research and Design are areas of expertise focused on making technology accessible and enjoyable to use. Increasingly, the tech world has focused on building UX teams and integrating them into product development, as a good UX process is important to creating effective products. Even decades after the concept of user experience was popularized by Don Norman, most people aren’t aware of what UX professionals do. This is especially true when it comes to newer areas of technological development like artificial intelligence (AI) and the contribution of conversational UX professionals to AI products. Conversational UX strives to help us talk to tools like Alexa, ChatGPT, Cleverbot, Siri, or Replika so that the conversation feels as natural as possible. However, there is still a tendency for conversational UX professionals to focus too much on making the technology work and not enough on understanding the cultural nuances of how people communicate. In this paper, I discuss why it’s important for teams working on conversational AI to have social science training and be able to design for cultural and gender diversity. I argue that most tech companies falsely claim to be interested in designing for diversity and accessibility. Meanwhile, voice-controlled AI struggles with many kinds of accents and languages and forces many people to speak in unnatural ways. The field of AI development needs user experience professionals who see conversation as a cultural exchange, even when it is mediated by technology.