Episode 141 of The Informed Life podcast features a conversation with Rachel Price . Rachel is a Principal Information Architect at Microsoft and teaches Information Architecture at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle. She’s also a previous guest.
Our latest conversation focused on a subject central to IA today: how to use artificial intelligence responsibly. Rachel shared a presentation on the subject at this year’s IA Conference, and later published a blog post about it.
AI’s impact is not up for debate. As Rachel put it,
Yes, sure, we are in the thick of a hype cycle around it, but that does not mean it’s going away at the end of the hype cycle. That seems pretty clear. At some point in your career, you will be interacting with AI as a user, right? That seems like a given at this point. But more specifically, to my little soapbox, as someone working with a product team, you’re going to be part of a team that ships some feature on some product someday that uses AI, and that requires us to think differently about how we design things and what we need to be aware of and what we need to be thinking about when we decide how we’re going to use AI in a feature or what it’s going to be able to do and how a user will interact with it and how it plays into the user experience.
The question is how to balance enthusiasm for the technology with designing solutions that serve real user needs. She experienced this tension firsthand when her teams were mandated to implement AI features into products. This necessitated learning about the technology’s capabilities and constraints. Her background as an information architect also provided a useful lens:
the skills I had as an IA, the systems thinking I was already doing, the way I work, the kinds of thorny problems I tend to think about, and the ways I have of facilitating people through complex and maybe ambiguous situations, all of those skills were the same skills I ended up needing to be a responsible AI practitioner.
She also had an ally in Microsoft itself: the company’s Responsible AI Standard (pdf) provided a useful framework for promoting a more user-centered approach to building AI-powered features.
In the current stage of the hype cycle, organizations are incentivized to deploy AI-powered features for the sake of the technology, and not necessarily because it creates value for users. Rachel’s main point is that information architects are well-equipped to help organizations navigate this tension skillfully.
That said, traditional IA skiils aren’t enough: it’s also essential to understand what the technology can and can’t do, and how. Anyone who designs digital experiences in 2024 needs to roll up their sleeves and become familiar with generative AI. This conversation is a good starting point.
The Informed Life episode 141: Rachel Price on Responsible AI