Sarah Burton is a Lead Product Designer at Dovetail, a customer insights hub that helps companies better understand their customers so they can build better products and services for them. They just launched Dovetail 3.0, which includes a series of AI features that help you analyze and extract insights from customer surveys, interviews, and app store reviews.
In my conversation with Sarah, we discuss:
🤖 How to balance AI automation and human expertise
🔍 The importance of understanding customer problems before jumping too quickly on the AI train
🧠 Design tactics to help you deal with AI’s unpredictable nature
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Dovetail 02:51 The Next Generation of Customer Analysis and Insights 09:52 The Role of AI in Enhancing Customer Insights 13:03 Human-Centric AI Integration Principles 19:59 Three Levels of AI Automations 24:56 Understanding Customer Needs and AI Opportunities 27:25 Integrating Design and Engineering for AI Solutions 29:21 Designing for Unpredictability in AI 36:52 Designing for Trust and Transparency in AI 43:02 Navigating AI Pressure in Design
My main takeaways from this conversation:
* Don’t start from AI and retrofit problems to it. Start from your customer problems and then see if AI is a good solution.
* AI features don’t need to be binary (on or off) because outputs can still be useful even if they’re not perfect.
* Design AI systems with a “human-in-the-loop” mindset. People want to control and collaborate with AI, instead of automating every single task.
* Make AI solve problems and tasks that people hate to do so they can focus on what they love to do.
* Don’t expect your customers to be prompt engineers. Design an interface that helps them get their task done effectively and do the hard work behind the scenes.
* AI is enabling an advanced level of understanding and analyzing customer sentiment by making it easy to ask a question across a large body of qualitative data.
* If you’re integrating AI in your product, it needs to convey trust and provide transparency about its outputs.