Jon Plummer

(This is a work in progress, but a pretty good start)

Designing AI-powered product experiences

User needs and customer problem first

Solving a valuable customer problem is paramount. Before selecting any technological solution, including AI, we prioritize understanding user needs and clearly defining the problem we aim to solve. Any AI application must serve a genuine, identified user need, rather than being a solution in search of a problem.

Transparency, explainability, and trust

We recognize that users may be curious, or even apprehensive, about how AI-powered features operate. While full algorithmic explainability may not always be feasible or necessary, we commit to being transparent about the inputs and context that drive AI outputs. We hope to empower users with a sense of control, offering opportunities to validate choices, preview actions, and interact with AI as an assistant before letting it run as an autonomous agent. Maintaining an audit trail of AI actions also supports accountability and trust.

Handling errors and edge cases

We acknowledge that AI-powered features will sometimes produce wrong or unexpected outputs. Our design approach for these scenarios focuses on graceful error handling and keeping the human in the loop. This means

• Anticipating and mitigating potential issues through careful AI setup and training
• Designing interfaces that offer previews, recommendations, and clear actions rather than proceeding blindly
• Ensuring mechanisms for users to easily correct, override, or provide feedback on AI outputs
• Maintaining a design philosophy where the AI recommends and assists, allowing users to retain ultimate control until they explicitly release the system to act.

Ethical design and bias mitigation

We strive to reduce bias in AI-powered features by

• Grounding our understanding in real customer knowledge rather than internal assumptions.
• Working with and analyzing customer data responsibly, without alteration, and ensuring its privacy and security
• Establishing processes for monitoring the output of our features for unintended biases that may emerge

Iteration and learning through metrics

• Clear project goals define success.
• Success metrics (e.g., accuracy, recall, task completion rates) and experiential metrics (e.g., user satisfaction, perceived control, trust) are established upfront.
• Continuous monitoring and analysis of these metrics drive iterative improvement, allowing us to refine the AI’s performance and the user experience over time.

Using AI tools in day-to-day UX work

Our UX team embraces the strategic and responsible integration of AI tools into our daily workflows to enhance our capabilities and deliver more valuable experiences.

Strategic tool adoption and augmentation

We are actively experimenting with AI tools like Figma Make, ChatGPT, and Gemini to understand their potential. Our focus is not merely on speed, but on how these tools can enhance our ability to deliver valuable and usable experiences. We view AI primarily as an augmentation to our existing skills, particularly for

• Inspiration and ideation: Generating diverse concepts, content variations, or design alternatives.
• Early-stage prototyping: Quickly sketching out ideas.
• Analyzing research data: Identifying patterns or themes in qualitative data (with careful oversight).

Maintaining UX quality through human oversight

The ultimate responsibility for UX quality remains with the human designer and the members of the team with which they work. When using AI tools, each designer is accountable for the quality and accuracy of the output on their projects, regardless of AI assistance. We commit to human oversight and critical evaluation of any AI-generated content or insights. AI is a tool to assist, not replace, the designer’s judgment, expertise, and empathy. All AI-assisted work undergoes the same review and validation processes as any UX work.

Continuous learning and cross-pollination

We encourage designers to

• Actively experiment with new AI tools and techniques
• Share their learnings and best practices with the wider UX team and their project teams
• Replicate and build upon the successful experiments of others
• Embrace a fluidity in job boundaries, recognizing that AI tools may enable designers to contribute to areas traditionally outside core UX, fostering greater cross-functional collaboration

Ethical use of AI tools and intellectual property

Our ethical considerations for designing AI-powered products extend to our use of AI tools. We commit to

• Transparency: Clearly acknowledging when AI tools have been used in our work, internally and externally where relevant. We will never misrepresent AI-assisted work as purely human-created
• Data privacy and IP: Exercising caution regarding proprietary or sensitive customer data when interacting with external AI models. We will ensure we adhere to company policies and legal guidelines regarding data input into AI tools and the intellectual property of generated outputs
• Maintaining control: Never ceding our understanding or control of customer knowledge, the design process, or design work to AI tools. The human designer remains the expert and ultimate decision-maker, responsible for the integrity of their work and the insights and design artifacts they share

So many things!

• Work
  • I promoted someone
  • I failed to promote someone, but learned a lot and it was the right decision
  • We’ve had a couple of leadership offsites and they have been both pleasant and valuable
  • I’ve guided my team from AI-skeptic or AI-agnostic to AI-curious, and written a quick position paper to explain our approach to both using AI tools and designing for AI-powered experiences
  • UX people are strong participants in product trios, at long last
  • We’re hiring!
• Home
  • We’ve caught up on a handful of long-overdue home projects, just in time for the summer heat. Curtains, blinds, gym flooring, patch and paint, more curtains… there’s more to do, always, but good progress after a bit of a stall
  • The ADU is now occupied
  • The girl is enjoying her six-week ballet intensive in a far-off state
  • I got my GMRS license. Say hello to WSIX524
  • Mr. Fixit has branched out into a little light metal work including repairing a watering can and making a house key easier for a blind person to use

So many things, in retrospect:

• Home progress!
  • Landscaping is done, trees are in
  • Storm drains are cleaned
  • The network is regularly providing 1200Mbps, after modernizing a bit (paid for by selling the slightly older equipment)
• Work progress!
  • The concept sprint I led was a resounding success – the execs wish they could sell our plan now, but they recognize they need to wait until they fund it and we build it – and there’s talk of more
  • The pendulum is swinging back toward being more customer-centric
• Life progress!
  • I pulled 410 last week by doing the plate math wrong, and it was no problem at all
  • At my last appointment my PT said “good job;” I bet PTs don’t say that often

A strategic reserve in (of?) a commodity implies that it’s in the U.S. strategic interest to invest to be protected from price shocks or supply restrictions due to the importance of the commodity to the economy or military readiness.

The best way to protect from bitcoin price shock is to not buy any. The best way to protect from a bitcoin supply restriction is to not use any.

Both of these are free.

When receiving feedback on a design or other work the important thing is to see the intent behind the feedback and address that, rather than take the specific advice or try to appease the feedback-giver.

Only by addressing the intent behind the feedback can the work be improved. yes, this might mean taking the specific advice, but it might not. The specific advice may not be the right answer.

Appeasement is waste.

• Vacations are winding down and people are starting to come back to work. The team is filling out again.
• I convinced the SVP of Product to be quizzed about our product strategy – we’ll put a script and some visuals together for our annual Company Connect and hopefully address longstanding complaints that people aren’t sure how their work contributes to our strategy. This has raised other interesting topics that might also become topics, like how we really make money and where it goes, how our pricing and packaging works, etc. A lot of the things I was hoping to accomplish this year have been deprioritized (rightly) due to some technical pickles we find ourselves in, so this represents an opportunity to be influential beyond the usual process sand product stuff we do on the reg; fingers crossed.
• The ladies are back and the house is no longer empty. This also means my diet will improve – bachelor-mode Jon is (far) less disciplined than husband-mode Jon.

Small quality-of-life adjustments can have an amazing effect. Sure, the fact that you need to push on the door a little bit to lock its deadbolt is not a huge deal; it hardly slows you down, takes little effort, and there’s nearly no additional wear-and-tear as a result. Not a huge deal once, that is. Eight times a day every day as people come and go, sometimes with full hands or in a hurry, adds up to thousands of exactly-repeated minor annoyances per year with a single cause that is readily fixed. So the value of that fix is quite high, even if each incident is barely noticeable.

• I adjusted the strike plates on our exterior doors as mentioned above. It’s fab! (Ordinarily this would have been done by the contractor, but I put in the strikes so it fell to me.) Therese were not the strikes with the tab with the screwdriver hole, either.
• I also some moved boxes and furniture out of the garage, and rearranged some things, so that we can now park one car in the garage. Halfway there!
• During that process I started a tool donation box. There are some things that I’ve bought two or three times, and some things I have that I hope never to use again, and these can go to the tool library. Fish tape, transfer pump, redundant pipe wrench? Sayonara.
• Adapting to people being out for summer trips (and to the recent upheaval in priorities) has not been as difficult as I expected, and it has been fun to dive into a little bit of design work to keep things moving for a team who has both designers out.
• I had a delightful coffee with a former coworker who is looking for work. We’ve resolved to meet quarterly.

Work was…fine…this week. Lots of folks are out or about to be out and while there’s a moment to try to wrestle projects and processes into shape there are not a lot of people to do that with; preparing projects to to bowl along while they are out is more pressing. But with the girl and the lady out of the house I was productive with home projects. In the last week I’ve

• sent a care package
• taken care of a library fine by finding and returning the book
• bought a copy of that same book, as a gift
• set up garage shelves and populated them
• moved the last of the boxes and tools from the neighbors’ garage
• set up a greenhouse (shh, it’s a surprise)
• reconnected with an old friend
• thrilled a nephew with birthday gifts
• installed missing trim on a piece of furniture
• installed a door stop on the door to the cat litter box area
• went to a baseball game
• had the tires replaced on a car that sorely needed it
• replaced wipers on that same car
• replaced antenna garnish on that same car
• washed a different car
• given myself a haircut
• put a hook on the back of the closet door
• built a credible trashcan of an unusual size for a specific installation
• found and replaced a furnace filter
• epoxied together the house numbers and their holding shape
• done some emergency laundry
• kept all the plants and cats alive

Juneteenth National Independence Day was this last Wednesday. It was odd to have a holiday mid-week but

• Juneteenth is worth celebrating, worth remembering, worth considering in this political moment.
• I forgot that most of our walls are backed by plywood, so a towel bar installation I had put off was unexpectedly quick and dust-free.
• The newish head of engineering thanked me for my attention and care to our common (and coming) process fixes.
• The notion that we should (and that it makes economic sense to) focus on the things we can do that will help a lot of (and a lot of new) customers is starting to sink in among influential people. The notion that we should (and that it makes economic sense to) work a little harder so that our customers don’t have to is taking a little more time, but I think we’ll get there.

I fell off the weekly wins wagon hard in November, then wrote just one earlier this month. Time to get back on.

• Social win – I saw a friend and past coworker who lives in town and it was lovely. I should reach out to more folks.
• Social win – the parents and mother-in-law were in town for the girl’s graduation, and brought their attendant challenges, but everything went just fine.
• Social win – a different friend and past coworker who lives all the way across the country and I have agreed to chat monthly. No reason not to!
• Lesson – plan, then check. When I’ve done just one or the other things have usually gone fine, but not always. This time a stainless steel part about 50mm square ($60 worth of material and cutting) was cut too large and is useless. Turns out it was my fault; all the other parts from the job are fine, I just missed double-checking the dimensions on the one piece. So I need to have that one redone. But the nice people at the fab have agreed to give my reorder special attention.
• Leadership – I was able to take a work maneuver, reasserting focus on the goal, and use it with our HVAC subcontractor. “There’s no explanation for water appearing there!” “Ah, but water is there, and got there somehow, so there is an explanation. I don’t care whose fault it is, I’d like to know how it got there and what we need to do to prevent it now that this has happened.”