Jo Minney is a small business founder and technical communicator based (for now) in Perth, Western Australia. She is passionate about user experience, data-driven decision making, cats and travel – not necessarily in that order. She’s also an avid maker, from 3D printing to sewing to woodworking, and loves combining technology and creativity to make cool stuff and encouraging others to do the same.
By day, you’ll find Jo working with the Devhouse team to help charities and NGOs develop bespoke digital platforms to further their causes, or possibly freelancing as a Nielsen Norman certified user experience research consultant.
Jo is a passionate ambassador and lead mentor for She Codes Australia, a social enterprise that aims to make tech jobs more accessible for women, and the co-host of a podcast for women, by women, about women (and otters). She can regularly be found with a microphone in hand speaking about user experience, accessibility, imposter syndrome, closing the gender gap and pockets.
As developers it is easy to get trapped in our comfort bubbles and assume that our 'knowledge' is informed. After all, many of us have spent years around or adjacent to programming technologies, and if we can't formulate educated opinions of those technologies... who can?
The problem is that at least *some* of your opinions are likely based on outdated information, personal experiences that don't reflect the whole, or learned bias.
Why should you care? Because you might be avoiding technologies (or sticking with others) because of those biases, even when they aren't the best fit for you, your employer, or your clients.
Together, let's dive into some of the most popular fallacies about web programming languages and approach them with fresh eyes - most importantly, acknowledging that our biases do exist, and that it is healthy to challenge them (even if we don't act on them).
It's unlikely that AI will ever truly replace UX researchers, but as LLMs come along in leaps and bounds, we'd be foolish not to consider whether we can use these tools to 'research' more effectively.
The real trick that we need to discover is... what can we offload to ChatGPT? And when do we need real live humans to make sure we're not ending up in AI bubbles?
Nielsen Norman certified UX consultant Jo Minney looks at some of the most common UX research practices and how AI can be integrated into them to save time and money - and whether or not the trade off is worth it.
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