Posted by Ayça Çakmaklı, UX Lead, Google Research, Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology Team
Google’s Responsible AI User Experience (Responsible AI UX) team is a product-minded team within Google Research. We apply responsible AI development practices to our user-centered user experience (UX) design process. In this post, we emphasize the importance of UX design and responsible AI in product development and showcase examples of responsible development across Google.
First, let’s talk about the UX part. Our team consists of designers, engineers, researchers, and strategists who manage the user-centered UX design process. We believe that effective product development occurs when there is clear alignment between user needs and a product’s value. This alignment is achieved through a thorough user-centered UX design process.
Second, we recognize the potential impact of generative AI (GenAI) on society. As the primary user advocate, we evolve our UX design process to meet the unique challenges posed by AI, focusing on ethical, societal, and long-term impacts. We contribute to the development of safety and inclusivity protocols that address key issues like content curation, security, privacy, and fairness.
Responsibility in product design is reflected in the user and societal problems we choose to address. We prioritize user problems with significant scale and severity to maximize the positive impact of GenAI technology. Communication across teams and disciplines is essential to responsible product design. We bridge the communication gap between technological expertise and user/societal expertise, ensuring deep user insight is applied to AI-powered product design decisions.
We create frameworks, guidebooks, prototypes, and multimedia tools to bring insights to life and facilitate responsible GenAI prototyping and development. For example, we developed MakerSuite, a generative AI platform that allows even those without ML experience to prototype creatively using large language models (LLMs). We also collaborate with product teams to adapt prototyping to support multimodal interaction with Google AI Studio.
Equitable speech recognition and computer vision are also key areas of focus. We partner with Howard University to build a high-quality African-American English dataset to improve the design of our speech technology products. We collaborate with sociologist Dr. Ellis Monk to release the Monk Skin Tone Scale (MST), a more inclusive skin tone scale to assess dataset inclusivity and improve model performance.
Our team provides consulting and guidance to support product teams in responsible product design. We develop actionable assets, such as the People + AI Guidebook, to share responsible design lessons and recommendations. Our goal is to help all product teams connect user needs with technology benefits through responsible product design.
In summary, Google’s Responsible AI UX team is committed to applying responsible AI development practices to our user-centered UX design process. We prioritize ethical considerations, collaborate across disciplines, and provide guidance to ensure responsible product development across Google.
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