I am a Google Pixel user and evangelist. I used to having Nexus and Pixel 4, and now I am using Pixel 6, Pixel Watch and Pixel Buds (also get a Chromecast the other day). Inherent with the nature of product design and engineering background and kind of right-mixed-left-brains, I came across a simple brain experiment by myself while in the middle of commuting route I took from home to work for the last couple of years, which was also inspired from a project called Daily Design.
Producing one UI design per day is how Daily UI Project works. However, another project close to this concept is somewhat more attractive and compelling to me, which we could call it Daily UX: One observation of everything in real life or situation per day that happens around me or my own experience that I want to solve, or get my hands dirty on.
Generated by an AI with the following prompt: “crowd where each person is typing on their smartphones in large subway station, in painting style”
Digging in people’s shoes to extract potential solutions could have been from couple of approaches. For example, user interview is one of the most adopted ways to know what the problems or barriers that people encounter, how people fix it (or how much they want to fix it). Yes it is a promising methodology and we should encourage designers to embrace it. But, my left brain rings a red flag when given second thought.
Hypothesis is quite simple: sometimes we just cannot pull the authenticity out of people’s mouth or action when probing into their lives by setup or experiment. I personally believe in one of the principles formulated by German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg in 1927, where the uncertainty principle states that we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy. The more we nail down the particle's position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa.
That’s how the project Daily UX came in and striked to my head that I want to write down some wild thoughts or ideas, which I think for those Pixel products I got at hand could be acting differently in essence of How might we. And of course not just Pixel products as my Daily UX target, but the Messenger App LINE (my current employer) is also the one in my pocket, but that would be another post though. Let’s back on to my focus.
And then suddenly, everyone is talking about this wave of ChatGPT. AI has already thundered a shining storm over the tranquil ocean all over the industries and newspaper headlines and attention online & offline. I definitely believe that those dynamics would cast a huge impact to software and hardware business, and particularly, the device on my hand, Pixel 6 and other Pixel family devices. How would those 30+ (and even more) ideas be evolved into something different when it comes to having AI into play? And how would those Apps, scenarios, or daily experiences be living in my Pixel ecosystem that has been empowered by Google’s computing engine? Before diving in, let’s quickly walk through the ideas from my Daily UX before ChatGPT was born.
Over 30+ points list is quite long and hard to read, so I re-organize them in a more comprehensive way to allow you all to get the ideas easily, and also could allow me to have a brief diagnosis of what my daily needs mostly reside on.
My daily ideations of Pixel family products (Limited to Pixel 6, Pixel Buds and Pixel Watch)
If quickly browsing the chart above, you can see most of my “what if“ are mainly focused on the software or Apps side of the possibilities (the first column from the left), which is followed by having a personal virtual assistant, the one that as a Pixel user, I feel extremely excited about. The current thing of artificial intelligence tremendous progress does shed bright light in many industries and applications, and that’s why ChatGPT and the latent concepts alike are what I want to pull out and plug them into the future relationships between human and the devices.
Thousands of explorations are never absent. But before that, I want to get into a series of design workouts first and step by step to see if there is any totally different thing that we might end up with. This is the Part 1 of my discovery journey, and those ideas will be distilled and wrung again. Next I want to step back little bit and talk about something that I found interesting. Here is the index below of my total series of essays:
Part 1 - My 30+ UX ideas of Pixel family devices into new way of AI adventure (prologue)
Part 2 - Party with Super Mario Bros. on Switch via dialogue before jumping right into AI
Part 3 - What if my top frequently used Apps are transformed into conversational user interface
Part 4 - Apps could be living peacefully together in Pixel ecosystem by the new design
Part 5 - How the future of these three elements: Search, Ads and Conversation (maybe voice as well) would evolve
Stay tuned.