Artificial intelligence has been with us for a while now. While the technology is still being refined and growing, it has found its footing in several industries so far, and the results are amazing.
Over the past two years, there have been giant steps made on the artificial intelligence front. As such, this technology has been integrated with businesses such as trading in stocks, finance, marketing, healthcare and most of all, on smart devices.
According to a survey done at an AI Conference, it was discovered that AI will accomplish any intellectual task a human being can by the year 2050. Now that might seem to be a while from now, but as always with technology, changes can be anticipated. Today, artificial intelligence can do a myriad of activities accurately. Technology has often been accused of taking away human jobs, and in most cases, it has been true. This is usually because a job that can be done by a few people is comfortably done by a single machine perfectly.
These changes are soon to be felt in the product design and development fields as it has in countless others. Artificial intelligence has already started to be rolled out on various sectors of the development and design field. Machines tend to learn faster and better than humans. This means that a machine can be able to identify things that a human cannot so easily identify. Even so, there are a few things that AI will do for humans to their benefit:
Increasing people’s life spans by taking over the more dangerous jobs such as mining and increasing safety automation in the manufacturing industries. For example, artificial intelligence can do a lot in automating automotive safety, analyzing data to determine whether a product is structurally sound.
Lowering the cost of doing business in manufacturing and design since the overall cost of machines is significantly lower than human labor. This, therefore, means that industries will use less developing products and as such the cost of commodities will also reduce making products more affordable to the populous.
Helping human beings produce better products. Artificial intelligence can help people in this regard in two ways. The first is by taking away the dull, mundane and repetitive tasks off our hands. The second way is getting us the best information for the job so that we can produce higher quality goods.
Artificial intelligence is meant to help people have an easier, more fulfilling life and not to take it away. Especially in the field of product design and development, AI can come in very handy. Here’s how.
Automated testing of features
When working in product management, you will quickly note that there is always a shortage of quality assurance engineers and analysts. This means that ensuring a product has a standard of quality has fallen in product management. This is manifested by the fact that testing product features take about 30-50% of the work before it’s approved for production. 30-50% of a production manager’s time is quite a lot. This time could have more productively been used on aspects such as user research and even competition research.
A more automated approach is best in manufacturing because if a QA engineer has to do the product testing themselves, they may become a potential blocker of the product. If the project manager and QA engineers are busy, it might derail the production schedule of a product. AI can test the product or feature as an actual user using the thousands of user sessions to find bugs in the system that a normal QA or PM would have missed.
Assisting with User Experience and Design
One of the toughest phases of a project is designing its user experience. For every product to be a success, it must resonate with the users. The users must feel like the product is easy to use and in some cases, even fun to use. The design process of any product uses a lot of creative muscle. This is especially so since the team must think about how the product will be used, validate those thoughts, imagine out of the box cases and which ones should and shouldn’t be supported and brainstorm which design will better embrace the objectives of the business with the help of brainstorming tool and give value to the client sooner.
All these are troubles AI can solve thus making life a bit easier for the designers. Artificial intelligence is a huge learning potential. Armed with data about how people use a certain product, a team can then build better designs for all types of products. Behavioral data can also be used to help the engineers know which edge cases are most frequent and as such come up with a way to help users overcome such instances.
In the design aspect, the most exciting thing about artificial intelligence is that it will be able to let the team know beforehand during the design phase whether or not a specific design will be successful or will flop. The AI can go through the proposed user flow and determine whether a user can complete a desired action or not. This saves the company from having to build multiple iterations of a product for testing. All you have to do is run and test all the designs through a simulation or design mocks to determine which version is better. For an organization heavily reliant on manufacturing, this technology can save the company millions in terms of research and development. It’s so because the company will have less wastage of time and resources which is always a plus.
Artificial intelligence is here to stay. Just like all the other groundbreaking technologies that have come before it, AI has already started to change the world. Businesses that will not embrace this technology will soon be left in the dust by the competition who will have realized the immense profitability artificial intelligence brings to the table. With this in mind, we can embrace the technology and rise to new heights of business and profitability.
