Insights Unlocked
Rethinking UX with the many “Many Wizards of Oz” approach with Sam Howard
Mon, 16 Dec 2024
Episode web page: https://bit.ly/3OQ2f80 ----------------------- Rate Insights Unlocked and write a review If you appreciate Insights Unlocked, please give it a rating and a review. Visit Apple Podcasts, pull up the Insights Unlocked show page and scroll to the bottom of the screen. Below the trailers, you'll find Ratings and Reviews. Click on a star rating. Scroll down past the highlighted review and click on "Write a Review." You'll make my day. ----------------------- Show Notes In this episode of Insights Unlocked, host Blair Fraser sits down with Dr. Sam Howard, Head of UX at Curio, to explore how AI is transforming the way people consume news. From Sam’s unique career journey—from academia to consulting to leading UX at a forward-thinking company—to Curio's mission of fixing fragmented and overwhelming news experiences, this conversation dives into the heart of user-centric design and AI innovation. Discover how Curio balances cutting-edge AI with trusted sources to deliver meaningful solutions, the challenges of creating archetypes in a rapidly evolving tech landscape, and why robust discovery research is more critical than ever. If you’re a UX researcher, designer, or product leader navigating the intersection of user experience and AI, this episode is packed with actionable insights and forward-thinking strategies. Key Themes & Highlights: The Power of User-Centered Design: Why embedding user insights at the start of product design leads to better outcomes. Sam’s approach to understanding and addressing user frustrations with traditional news platforms. AI in UX Research: How Curio blends AI personalization with reliable sources to maintain trust. The "Many Wizards of Oz" method: A groundbreaking approach to simulating AI experiences in user research. Tackling Behavioral Archetypes: Why Curio focuses on early adopters and behavioral archetypes instead of rigid personas. Addressing news avoidance and user anxiety through design thinking. Driving Impact in Organizations: How to align qualitative user research with quantitative data to influence stakeholders. Using video storytelling as a tool for fostering empathy and buy-in from business leaders. Future of UX and AI: The need to evolve UX methodologies for non-linear, AI-driven user journeys. Balancing transparency and value when communicating AI’s role to end users.
Chapter 1: What is the Many Wizards of Oz methodology?
Welcome back to the Insights Unlocked podcast. In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Sam Howard, head of UX at Curio, to explore how AI is transforming UX research and design. Sam introduces his Many Wizards of Oz methodology, a new approach to testing dynamic AI-driven experiences, and shares insights on blending innovation with user-centered design.
If you're passionate about creating products users truly love, this episode is for you. Enjoy the show.
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing, where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers, and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concept to execution.
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Senior Manager for Content Production and User Testing. And joining us today as host is User Testing's Blair Frazier, a staff product designer here at User Testing and based in our Edinburgh offices. Welcome, Blair.
Hey, everyone. Nice to be here.
And our guest today is Dr. Sam Howard, head of UX at Curio, which is an AI-driven, personal, up-to-date news companion anchored in trusted sources. He's a veteran researcher with stops at The Zone Group, John Lewis & Partners, and UserFi. Welcome to the show, Sam.
Thank you very much for having me. Great to be here. Sam, thank you for joining us today. So, you know, as we get started, I, of course, would just love for you to tell us a little bit more about You. your journey into the world of UX research and design, and as well as a little bit more about Curio and the sort of work that you're doing there.
Yeah, so my journey into the field, I guess, goes back as far as school, really. I studied psychology when I was in sixth form at school and really just bought into this entire concept of understanding and digging into why we do the things that we do. And I studied psychology at university from there and managed to take a particular module called the psychology of digital technology.
And it was just exactly what I wanted to do. As soon as I started digging into that as a kind of territory of psychology, before I even knew about human computer interaction or anything like that, I just saw that this was something I could really, really get stuck into.
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Chapter 2: How does user-centered design improve outcomes?
I think the interesting thing for us right now at Curio with our focus on AI is that we're probably thinking a few years ahead of where most users are today. So in terms of how we recruit and identify and involve users in our process and our thinking, we're having to really focus first on early adopters.
And when I talk about that, and personas is an interesting term, I tend to gravitate more towards thinking about archetypes of behavior, just because I find that a more helpful way of not eliminating people unnecessarily from the way that we think of who our product could be for.
And in the domain in which Curio is operating, there's some super clear kind of behavioral archetypes that we're able to kind of focus in on and really go after. So just to give you some examples of that, there's research published earlier this year from Reuters suggesting that four in 10 people worldwide are actively avoiding the news now.
either because they are exhausted by it, they're sick of it, it makes them feel too anxious. We're really operating in a world where the news has become far too overwhelming for nearing half of the population, which is a really huge signal for us to kind of go after.
And then there's also been some really fascinating research, both done externally and also by us internally too, on just how frustrated people are by their current news experience. And that's in terms of really how fragmented it is.
There's some really high quality sources that people could be accessing, but they're behind these paywalls and trying to get access to all of them makes no sense from a cost perspective. But paying for one feels like an overcommitment to that particular source when people are really kind of aspiring to make sure that they have a perspective across lots.
So people are gravitating towards the free sources, but the free sources are all shouting at you as loud as they can to try and grasp your attention. So everyone's kind of stuck in this really messy situation where nothing quite works. And because nothing quite works, everything's shouting louder and louder to try and be the thing that works for you.
So we're really focusing first on the people, as I say, who know this is a problem, are desperate for a solution to it. And once we've kind of cracked it for those early adopters, I think we can start to, you know, have a much wider go at cracking this for a broader population and really kind of letting them know that, hey, we know you're feeling this and we're fixing it.
With those early adopters that you start targeting, who you know have that problem that you're trying to solve, have you noticed any shifts or changes in patterns in the way that they're potentially engaging with news content, especially with it being delivered via an AI-driven method?
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Chapter 3: What challenges does AI present in UX research?
And you can see it. You even see it all over adverts on TV and everything. It's everywhere. So I completely understand when people have a bit of fatigue around it. Yeah.
That's an interesting question. We could all ask ourselves in what we're building. You mentioned the role of user insights being an important part of shaping Curio's own I think it's like an AI based personal news anchor. Hopefully I've characterized that okay. I'm fascinated by that actually.
Can you share how any specific research methodologies helped you better understand like real user needs and ultimately drive Curio's innovation in this space?
Yeah, I think this is probably the thing that's maybe been most fascinating of all for me over the last couple of years of working at Curio. In terms of establishing the user needs and everything like that, I think that I've briefly touched on it, but I think that the real thing that you need to nail in your process is discovery research.
actually not just relying on doing some testing as you go, but actually allocating and dedicating the time to really thinking about the problem space in the area as deeply as you can. And that's through, I think there can be a slight tendency with user research to not rely enough on external sources.
And industry papers, academic research, all of that kind of thing can actually, you can achieve a lot more with those things than you could ever do through your own internal research. There's vast amounts of money spent on producing these types of reports and this type of research. Often there's some real gold in there that you can use to really make sure that you get off on the right foot.
And that also has a really added benefit of meaning that It's quite helpful to use that kind of thing for helping to show some rigor in your process and really help you get some buy-in from stakeholders, knowing that it's kind of externally validated sources that you are using.
But yeah, I think the thing that has really fascinated me from a actual methods perspective in terms of how we at Curio are going about learning from users and iterating on our product is I think at a high level, I think AI is going to really require us as UX professionals to rethink our current set of methods and the way that we actually approach iterative design and testing.
Over, I guess, the last 10 years, as long as I've been doing UX research, a lot of the journeys and the types of interfaces that we have been testing and designing and prototyping out have tended to be quite linear in that you can guarantee that the type of journeys that users are going to go on and the types of things that they are going to see are relatively consistent.
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Chapter 4: How do behavioral archetypes influence product design?
and you're experimenting with your prompting structure and you're experimenting with the types of things that you get out of the AI to actually simulate with the user and with the participant what they might get from the experience. And that can be hard to do in one session.
It requires potentially some async work where you are maybe gathering some input from the user, feeding that through your system and then giving it back to them at a slightly later point. So if I go back to that cooking app analogy, you might gather all of that information about that family. You might then use your current AI to
simulate and produce the output for the user, and then actually bringing that back to them is when you really start to learn whether anything that you're doing is actually delivering value to the user, as opposed to with a more static experience with a prototype.
It's really interesting how that I think will really impact the way that UX works, because I think we will work a lot more closely with back-end engineering and machine learning engineers. And I think as a more cohesive team, we will need to be working in playgrounds and staging environments with AI to actually tweak the way that the AI is functioning as opposed to the front-end interface.
And I guess all in service of... being able to test and get feedback on something that feels real and relevant and personal versus something that's static due to the nature of generative AI and all the amounts of amalgamations that could potentially generate that their inputs can only produce something that's very personalized, right?
Absolutely. And I mean, I've learned that the hard way in a lot of respects because when I started, I approached it like any project I'd done before where we did use UI and interfaces to figure out what might work for the user.
But if you haven't got the AI connected into that process, you're in for a nasty shock, when you actually get to the point of trying to bring that together with the experience that you've tried to build in the more conventional way. So yeah, I think it requires a very different type of method.
It's interesting, taking us right back into the rapid prototyping Wizard of Oz sort of skills. It takes me back into my time at university, feeding stuff from under a table to make it look like something was printing out.
These sorts of things that can simulate those feelings of this thing being real and working, but taking them closer to that sort of product experience where you can get a reaction or get that feedback. So that's pretty cool. 100%. Maybe you've got some insights that you've collected through some of your research.
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