# Addressing UX Practitioners' Challenges in Designing ML Applications: an Interactive Machine Learning Approach

## TL;DR

This study explores how interactive machine learning tools can help UX practitioners design better ML-enabled interfaces by enabling experimentation, ethical assessment, and goal alignment, while also identifying current limitations and future directions.

## Contribution

It provides empirical insights into UX practitioners' use of interactive ML in design tasks and proposes machine teaching as a complementary approach to enhance UX design processes.

## Key findings

- Interactive ML enables UX practitioners to connect ML capabilities with user goals.
- Practitioners can identify ethical risks through direct experimentation.
- Limitations of interactive ML in UX design are identified and discussed.

## Abstract

UX practitioners face novel challenges when designing user interfaces for machine learning (ML)-enabled applications. Interactive ML paradigms, like AutoML and interactive machine teaching, lower the barrier for non-expert end users to create, understand, and use ML models, but their application to UX practice is largely unstudied. We conducted a task-based design study with 27 UX practitioners where we asked them to propose a proof-of-concept design for a new ML-enabled application. During the task, our participants were given opportunities to create, test, and modify ML models as part of their workflows. Through a qualitative analysis of our post-task interview, we found that direct, interactive experimentation with ML allowed UX practitioners to tie ML capabilities and underlying data to user goals, compose affordances to enhance end-user interactions with ML, and identify ML-related ethical risks and challenges. We discuss our findings in the context of previously established human-AI guidelines. We also identify some limitations of interactive ML in UX processes and propose research-informed machine teaching as a supplement to future design tools alongside interactive ML.