AI Didn’t Speed Up My Discovery

AI Didn’t Speed Up My Discovery There is a thing that happens in domain conversations. We talk about something, agree we understand it, and proceed. Then I show a sketch and the client says, “No, that is not what I meant.” The talking did not catch the gap. The visual did. AI lets me put a draft visual in front of a power user in the time it takes to have a conversation about it. Half-formed. Sometimes wrong on purpose. The draft becomes the thing we discuss. The client, who is the actual expert, validates or breaks it. The expensive part of the design moves earlier, into the cheap part. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

• 0:15Speaker 00

  Slow design in the AI era is what you do with time that AI gives you back. AI product discovery doesn't speed up the hard parts of design. It changes which parts become hard. I asked Google AI Studio to draft a queue for claim and policy reviewers on an insurance score platform. It returned a screen built around a single number, trust score, 98%. Cyan in a black panel labeled AI evaluation. With a verification matrix below it marking identity, policy coverage, and compliance as okay. A large approved task is the primary action. A select toggle at the top of the queue for a bulk approval.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  The screen had other things on it, too. Tabs, side panels, secondary actions. None of them really mattered. The visual hierarchy answered a question before the reviewer asked it. The pattern was fluent. It was also a rubber stamping nudge built on average case. Served on a screen whose entire job it is to review the cases that are not average. Hmm, that's interesting. So discovery is my favorite phase of any project. Ask anyone who's taken a class before now tell you how much emphasis I put on ideation and discovery. It truly is the favorite thing that I do. I always had expected AI to streamline it, make it faster.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  When in actuality, it did something else that was very important. AI absorbs the laborious parts of discovery and hands me back the time. And the harder work lives in the time AI gave me back. For over four years, I've been running discovery workshops and discussing how to make things work more fluidly, designing, diagramming, presenting workflow tools for both regulated industries and non-regulated industries. In a regulated industries group, I've done a lot recently with insurance, energy, industrial automation. The clients haven't changed much. The toolkit has drastically and dramatically changed. Over the past year, AI stepped into

• 2:27Speaker 00

  discovery phase, and two things have changed about how I do it. So reading my way into all of the regulatory deep dive regarding insurance regulations, industrial control system documentation, or AV signal flow specifications used to take, it used to take weeks. Now I can do it all in hours or even less. The information gathering, synthesis, and first pass analysis that used to consume a third of my time and produce nothing memorable, all that's now automated. AI is so good at this type of work. It makes the visual layer discovery very inexpensive.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  There's a thing that happens in domain conversations. We talk about something, agree, we understand it, and then proceed. Then I can show a sketch, and the client says, well, no, that's not what I want, or that's not what I meant. The talking did not catch the gap. The visual aid did. AI lets me put a draft visual in front of a power user in the time it takes to have a conversation about it. Half-formed, true. Sometimes wrong on purpose, true. The draft becomes the thing that we discuss. The client, who's the actual expert, validates the draft or breaks it. The expensive part of the design moves earlier into the cheap part. I talk about this all the time when I show my agile landscape. In the agile landscape, I

• 3:55Speaker 00

  talk about ideation, discovery, delivery, and release, and we talk about how the majority of money and time is focused on delivery when it should be balanced, and you should be spending a little more time in discovery so that you can make sure you're delivering the right things. So it creates this interesting conundrum. It creates this interesting twist. On the same project, I showed an AI-generated flow to the product owner. He flagged the bulk edit pattern in seconds. And a rule had never been articulated because in the domain, it was settled, not an open question. Then the team walked through the same flow end to end and made gaps in their own thinking that the project had been carrying silently for some time.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  The talking version of discovery would not have surfaced any of this, but the visual one did. This is what I expected. Walking into AI as a working designer. I noted that discovery would get faster, and it is. The six weeks that I'd usually spend would be compressed into two or three. My UX research process would shrink. I would save time. I would ship faster. But what actually happened? Discovery didn't actually get faster. And I don't know that I want it to. The boring parts of discovery got automated. And the time that opened up went somewhere that I didn't expect. It went into better decision making so we could build better products. When I was working with the group at NBC Universal for Universal Studios,

• 5:20Speaker 00

  what I can tell you is their marketing team really did a fantastic job, an incredible job with with all of the ideation and the discovery. And it led to quicker delivery times. But it wasn't because they spent less time in discovery. It was actually because they spent more time in discovery than they typically would. But they streamlined the decision making because all the creative was already done. Or, you know, they allowed for AI to at least prototype so that they could see things, so that they can make better choices, so that it yielded better results. So I guess what I'm trying to say is at the end of the day, if you're trying to compromise and you compromise on discovery, what's going to happen is you're going to spend way too much time in delivery.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  It's going to be way too expensive and you're going to build something that people hate. But if you just spend a little more time on discovery and leverage the extra time that you have in delivery to focus on releasing something that has value, you're going to be way better off, agile or not. That's going to do it for today's episode. I hope that you enjoyed it. If you have a topic you want us to discuss, learn more at agiledad.com. We'd love to hear from you. And as always, we encourage you to stay healthy, stay well, and stay agile, my friends. Until next time, do take care. Bye now.