Shaping the Future
of User Experience with AI
BY ANDREA AMATO
Every week, the Castille Product team meet to discuss the ongoing development of a new Digital platform. The platform follows a user’s career journey f rom their first employment to their retirement. Naturally, a lot of focus on user experience (UX) led to a recurring question within the team: how can we use AI to support UX? We knew that a digital revolution was underway wherein constructing an online platform necessitates the use of AI technology.
Any Product or Design team will know that constructing a feasible UX is important to ensure smooth user journeys, engagement, and the return of these users to the product. Dialogue around AI typically begins a worrying narrative where robots will replace human involvement, but the
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relationship between AI and UX is more complex. Empathy—the ability to share and understand the feelings of another individual, or ‘knowing what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes’—is a unique human trait that computers have not yet grasped.
AI technology works on the premise that it simulates human intelligence, including emotional attributes. Empathy can be difficult to mimic for AI systems, as human emotions are often nuance. For example, humans are able to smile and appear happy even when feeling the complete opposite. Artificial Empathy is a popular area of research for this reason, in that researchers must consider the complexities of human emotions, including