{"id":564561,"date":"2019-02-01T08:59:48","date_gmt":"2019-02-01T16:59:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?p=564561"},"modified":"2019-02-01T09:51:45","modified_gmt":"2019-02-01T17:51:45","slug":"guidelines-for-human-ai-interaction-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/guidelines-for-human-ai-interaction-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Guidelines for human-AI interaction design"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The increasing availability and accuracy of AI has stimulated uses of AI technologies in mainstream user-facing applications and services. Along with opportunities for infusing valuable AI services in a wide range of products come challenges and questions about best practices and guidelines for human-centered design. A dedicated team of Microsoft researchers addressed this need by synthesizing and validating a set of guidelines for human-AI interaction. This work marks an important step toward much-needed best practices for the complexities AI designers face.<\/p>\n
The integration of AI services such as prediction, recognition, and natural language understanding brings multiple new considerations to the fore for designers. For example, interaction designers have to grapple with rates of failure and success of AI inference, the changes in system behavior that may come with ongoing machine learning, and with the understandability and controllability of AI functions.<\/p>\n
The variability of current AI designs as well as high-profile reports of failures – ranging from the humorous, embarrassing or disruptive (for example, benign autocorrect errors) to the more serious, when users cannot effectively understand or control an AI system, (for example, accidents in semi-autonomous vehicles) – highlight opportunities for creating more intuitive and effective user experiences with AI. The ongoing conversation on human-centered design for AI systems shows that designers are hungry for trustworthy AI-centric design heuristics or guidelines.<\/p>\n
Over the last 20 years, research scientists and engineers have proposed guidelines and recommendations for designing effective interaction with AI-infused systems. Ideas span recommendations for managing user expectations, moderating the level of autonomy, supporting the resolution of ambiguity, and providing awareness about changes that may occur as the system learns about users. Unfortunately, many of these design suggestions are scattered through different publications and are rarely presented explicitly as guidelines. The Microsoft research team identified more than 150 such design recommendations, many of which captured similar ideas. By distilling and validating them into one unified set of guidelines, this work empowers the community to move forward and build on existing knowledge.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe design community didn\u2019t have a unified set of guidelines for creating intuitive interactions between humans and AI systems. We set out to create and validate one,\u201d said Saleema Amershi, lead researcher on the development of the Guidelines for Human-AI Interaction.<\/p>\n
The Guidelines for Human-AI Interaction<\/a>\u2014as well as the process for developing and validating them\u2014will be presented at the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Glasgow, Scotland. The team\u2014Saleema Amershi, Dan Weld, Mihaela Vorvoreanu, Adam Fourney, Besmira Nushi, Penny Collisson, Jina Suh, Shamsi Iqbal, Paul Bennett, Kori Inkpen, Jaime Teevan, Ruth Kikin-Gil, and Eric Horvitz\u2014synthesized more than 20 years of knowledge and thinking in AI design spanning academia and industry into a compact set of generally applicable design guidelines for human-AI interaction.<\/p>\n In its quest to synthesize broad and specific guidance coming from a variety of sources into a unified set of guidelines that could be universally embraced, the CHI 2019 paper, titled Guidelines for Human-AI Interaction, is also a 20th anniversary celebration of Eric Horvitz\u2019s formative CHI 1999 paper<\/a>. That paper proposed principles for smoothly weaving together human and AI capabilities and harnessing a mix of AI and human initiatives.<\/p>\n Following a rigorous process, Microsoft researchers began by collecting more than 150 AI-related design recommendations\u2014potential guidelines\u2014from respected sources that ranged from scholarly research papers to blog posts and internal documents. Grouping recommendations by theme, the team was able to condense them into a manageable number. They then embarked on multiple rounds of evaluation with user experience (UX) and human computer interaction (HCI) experts, seeking to ensure that the guidelines were easy to understand as well as applicable to a wide range of popular AI products.<\/p>\n \u201cWe wanted to ensure the guidelines are specific and observable at the UI level. So, we eliminated overarching principles like \u2018set expectations,\u2019 or \u2018build trust\u2019 and instead translated them into specific, actionable guidelines,\u201d said Mihaela Vorvoreanu, senior program manager.<\/p>\n The resulting 18 guidelines for Human-AI Interaction are grouped into four sections that prescribe how an AI system should behave upon initial interaction, as the user interacts with the system, when the system is wrong, and over time. While the Guidelines for Human-AI Interaction are provided to support design decisions, they are not intended to be used as a simple checklist. The recommended guidelines are intended to support and stimulate conversations about design decisions between user experience and engineering practitioners, and to foster further research in this evolving space. The authors recognize that there will be numerous situations where AI designers must consider tradeoffs among guidelines and weigh the importance of one or more over others. Rising capabilities and use cases may suggest a need for additional guidelines.<\/p>\n