Thread by @RohanIrvine

Next up we have @chrisnoessel — Designing Agentive Technology

#UXAustralia

Chris is here to talk to you about something he kind of made up and he wants you to hopefully see something new.

Chris has a DSLR camera and is going through the entire process of taking a photo with it.

There are many many steps.

The Google clip takes photos as long as there is light and learns which photos, people are meaningful and shows you the most relevant.

The DSLR helps you take photos, the Google clip brings you photos.

Now we have a vaccuum cleaner. One you do the work, the other you specify when and where to vaccuum.

One is a tool for you to vaccuum.
The other gets you clean floors.

The connection between these objects became apparent when Chris was doing research and had to purchase automatic feeders for his cats.

Chris was building a Robo-investor - it does it's work outside of your attention.

How do you design for experiences outside of your attention? How do you usability test it?

The distinguishing distinction is that we grant these objects to have agency on our behalf.

This is what Chris calls Agentive Technology.

When showing this to colleges students they said this is a first world problem.

So Chris found some real world examples of Agentive tech being used.

On the left is a set of microphones that you leave around a neighbourhood to locate where a gunshot came from

There is also an app that you can use with a safeword to check if you're okay on a date, the bottom left is a gardening tool.

Agentive technology is as big as you can think about a problem.

So how is it different from automation?

In automation your goal is to limit the interaction of a human, if a human needs to be involved it's not working as well as it should.

Agentive technology is supposed to have interactions with people.

Agentive is "new"

Autopilot is a great example of Agentive technology and was first shown in 1914.

Nowadays you don't need millions of dollars to solve problems with Agentive technology, we walk around with supercomputers in our pocket.

Our ability to design for it quickly and scale it is new, which is why it's interesting.

Agentive is different.

We would talk about accordance in our design, how do you know how it works by the way it's designed.

Not great for Agentive tech.

A better model is using a butler as a metaphor. You are no longer doing tasks but requesting them

This current interaction model compared with an Agentive model.

Full size image available at: bit.ly/bowtiediagram

There are different categories of products that dictate how much work you would do for them and what price you would pay for it.

The example is coffee.

Commodity: You pick up beans from a warehouse
Product: We package and send it to you
Service: We make the coffee for you

Experience sits on-top of this pyramid.

Chris raises this because every stage of the pyramid requires your attention to extract value from it.

Agentive Tech doesn't compete for you attention.

Agentive is a threshold — when you use the tech you are unlikely to go back.

By providing the post attention value its hard for you customers to go back to your competitors.

Agentive is A.I.

Chris works for IBM and is going to show us Watson — rough follow up after Aral talk. "I wasn't around in the 30's".

Agentive may seem like a type of product but it's an over simplistic example.

It's a mode of use.

Here's an example of the different zones the technology fits into in the different modes.

UX absorbs AI

In the 80s spell checkers were their own piece of software.

It only took 1 year that WordPerfect incorporated spellcheck into a word processor.

*Here's the screenshot of my Agentive technology spellcheck*

Eventually we will absorb these Agentive technologies and have to build experiences for them.

We want to be making human and AI the best team it can possibly be.

Good intro into Agentive Technology :)

@threadreaderapp unroll please!