[Herald Design Forum 2021] ‘Designing user experience the way forward’

Designers should have a grasp on artificial intelligence to build a system that is fully aware of what users want in advance, said Yong Kim, chief product officer at Woowa Brothers, which runs delivery app Baemin, at this year’s Herald Design Forum on Thursday.

“Users shouldn’t have to tell their apps what they want, when they want it. They should be given choices they like and that will be the new human-machine interface,” Kim said.

Kim referred to GPT-3, a language-generation model that produces human-like text on demand using deep learning. The tool, which US-based OpenAI created, gives designers reason to seek more than aesthetic appeal when they build better human-machine interfaces.

For example, Baemin offers a variety of services on its app when users search for food, because it is not just food deliveries they might want. The app should be able to provide users with suggestions and not just responses, according to Kim.

And to do so, designers should be able to put together an interface that knows how to gather users’ preferences and categorize them, Kim said.

He added that AI poses as an opportunity rather than a threat because designers will be taking advantage of it to roll out platforms to better communicate users’ needs to machines.

Meanwhile, Kwon Young-jin, who leads Hyundai Motor Group’s Zer01ne Playground, highlighted reshaping user experience in future mobility, saying “diversity” and “universality” are key. Zer01ne is an open innovation platform Hyundai launched in 2018.

Kwon said anyone, including people with disabilities, should have freedom in movement. He described self-driving wheelchairs as a starting point to set his initiative in motion.

“Wheelchairs are what they have been for the past decades while we see autonomous vehicles on the road. We can’t say future mobility unless we see something different for wheelchairs, too,” Kwon said, adding his team will come up with self-driving wheelchairs.

Self-driving wheelchairs, Kwon said, benefit more than people with disabilities because everyone could take advantage of a self-driving vehicle in places such as hospitals and airports, where less danger and restrictions are found as compared with open roads.

“Self-driving wheelchairs, I would say, could just be the prototype of a new mode of transportation,” Kwon said. He added that freedom of movement, regardless of health condition or age, is what anyone wants and needs, so it is in the best interests of everyone to carry on with the initiative.

“Try to think of it as something for all of us and not some of us. That’ll put things in perspective,” Kwon said.

By Choi Si-young (siyoungchoi@heraldcorp.com)