Investigating How Practitioners Use Human-AI Guidelines: A Case Study on the People + AI Guidebook

TL;DR

This study explores how industry practitioners utilize the People + AI Guidebook, revealing its role in addressing AI design challenges, education, and communication, while highlighting the need for more support in early design phases.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into real-world usage of AI design guidelines by practitioners and identifies gaps in current resources for early-stage AI product development.

Findings

Practitioners use the guidebook for addressing AI design challenges.

The guidebook aids in education and cross-functional communication.

Practitioners want more support for early ideation and problem framing.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) presents new challenges for the user experience (UX) of products and services. Recently, practitioner-facing resources and design guidelines have become available to ease some of these challenges. However, little research has investigated if and how these guidelines are used, and how they impact practice. In this paper, we investigated how industry practitioners use the People + AI Guidebook. We conducted interviews with 31 practitioners (i.e., designers, product managers) to understand how they use human-AI guidelines when designing AI-enabled products. Our findings revealed that practitioners use the guidebook not only for addressing AI's design challenges, but also for education, cross-functional communication, and for developing internal resources. We uncovered that practitioners desire more support for early phase ideation and problem formulation to avoid AI product failures. We discuss the implications for future resources aiming to help practitioners in designing AI products.