I’m trying out a simple new experiment with our lovely AI chatbots.
Is AI becoming a pair of crutches for humans, or is it helping us use our time better?
Books have been around for quite a while now, and just like our ways of listening to music have evolved from gramophones and radios to iPods and iPhones, surely our ways of learning must evolve with time too, right?
Instead of repelling AI, can we embrace AI to become our new way of learning?
It usually takes us about 7 hours to read a 250-page self-help book, assuming a read speed of one page every 2 minutes.
Now, if you were to ask AI to summarise ten books related to UI/UX, it should save you a ton of time brain-power, right?
One glaring drawback to this approach may be that you’ll lose out on the many personal experiences or lessons that an author would include in their book. This problem exists with any summary though, and cannot be attributed only to AI generated summaries.
Apart from this, it seems like a helpful tool in learning new things, right?
For instance, I ran this prompt into Claude 3.5 Sonnet:
“10 most popular UI/UX books”; and it returned a list that it decided was a list of popular UI/UX books.
Then I told it to: “Tell me common learnings across these 10 books, which will help designers design better UX.”
And it returned these as the most important common points:
User-Centered Design: All these books emphasize putting the user at the center of the design process. Understanding user needs, behaviors, and preferences is crucial for creating effective designs.
Simplicity and Clarity: Many of these books, especially “Don’t Make Me Think,” stress the importance of simplicity. Clear, intuitive interfaces reduce cognitive load and improve user satisfaction.
Affordances and Signifiers: From “The Design of Everyday Things,” designers learn about making interface elements self-explanatory. Users should be able to understand how to interact with your design without explicit instructions.
Consistency: Maintaining consistency in design patterns, language, and interactions helps users feel comfortable and learn your interface quickly.
Feedback and Visibility: Providing clear feedback for user actions and making system status visible helps users understand what’s happening and prevents confusion.
Accessibility: Designing for all users, including those with disabilities, is a recurring theme. This includes considerations for color contrast, text size, and alternative input methods.
Information Architecture: Organizing information in a logical, understandable way is crucial for user navigation and comprehension.
Emotional Design: Don Norman’s work emphasizes that effective design appeals not just to functionality but also to emotions, creating a more engaging user experience.
Iterative Design and Testing: Many of these books advocate for an iterative design process with frequent user testing to refine and improve designs based on real user feedback.
Psychology in Design: Understanding human psychology, perception, and behavior can inform better design decisions, as highlighted in “100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People.”
Lean and Agile Methodologies: Books like “Lean UX” introduce the concept of applying lean and agile principles to UX design, emphasizing rapid prototyping and validated learning.
Context of Use: Considering the environment and context in which a product will be used is crucial for designing appropriate and effective interfaces.
Universal Design Principles: Many of these books discuss timeless design principles that can be applied across various interfaces and products to enhance usability and aesthetics.
Any UX designers reading this on the Bootcamp publication, please do drop your thoughts on how correct these are in your professional life, on my email:
adityakailaje@icloud.com
Many thanks!
Isn’t this a far better way of learning?
To satisfy my urge to know if AI can really replace reading self-help books, I still need to verify which tool can summarise books better/the best right now. For this I shall be conducting another experiment over the next few weeks, the progress and results of which I shall publish here on Medium.
I’ll be freshly reading 5 books about a common topic (business & leadership) that anybody should be able to comprehend easily, and then cross question popular LLMs to decide which one can summarise those books the best.
Stay tuned for the results.
It’s all about who uses AI first, to grow the fastest.
