Llewyn Paine, Ph.D.

Under biometric privacy laws like BIPA, user research recordings containing users’ faces or voices can put your company at risk for lawsuits and fines. Legal departments are increasingly requiring more stringent redaction, and in some cases banning recording outright. This comes at a high cost for UX teams who are already being asked to do more with less, as losing access to recordings can increase duplicative research effort and reduce the accuracy of results.

AI offers new solutions… Show more

Under biometric privacy laws like BIPA, user research recordings containing users’ faces or voices can put your company at risk for lawsuits and fines. Legal departments are increasingly requiring more stringent redaction, and in some cases banning recording outright. This comes at a high cost for UX teams who are already being asked to do more with less, as losing access to recordings can increase duplicative research effort and reduce the accuracy of results.

AI offers new solutions for UX teams who want to keep research recordings longer without violating biometric privacy laws. In this demo, we’ll show how we used off-the-shelf tools to intelligently redact users’ voices, faces, and bodies in research videos. By removing biometric identifiers, you can compliantly archive research recordings indefinitely, enabling your team to mine them for insights for years to come. Show less

Building products using emerging technologies is more difficult. As we’re seeing with building AI products today, teams are often chasing which use case and customer profiles to focus on. It’s harder because the new technologies make us obsess over what’s possible rather than what people actually need. Dr. Llewyn Paine joins us to share lessons and strategies from her advising teams working on spatial computing, virtual reality, and robotics. Her expertise is helping teams make better product… Show more

Building products using emerging technologies is more difficult. As we’re seeing with building AI products today, teams are often chasing which use case and customer profiles to focus on. It’s harder because the new technologies make us obsess over what’s possible rather than what people actually need. Dr. Llewyn Paine joins us to share lessons and strategies from her advising teams working on spatial computing, virtual reality, and robotics. Her expertise is helping teams make better product decisions through research. We’ll discuss how to identify your best potential customers and design higher-value products and services they’ll love to use. She is an innovation strategy consultant with nearly two decades of experience in emerging technologies, including mixed reality and AI at Microsoft, and experimental media for Disney. She has helped emerging technology teams launch flagship products and secure investments of over $300M. designofai.substack.com to get additional resources. Show less

Augmented Reality. Internet of Things. Robotics. Smart home devices. What these all have in common is physical space. In a world where “design” in tech has meant creating interfaces for flat screens for the past 40 years, these new spatial technologies represent something dramatically different. For the first time, technology can understand the spaces where we live and work, allowing the physical and digital to merge in ways that were never before possible. Spatial awareness and head-mounted… Show more

Augmented Reality. Internet of Things. Robotics. Smart home devices. What these all have in common is physical space. In a world where “design” in tech has meant creating interfaces for flat screens for the past 40 years, these new spatial technologies represent something dramatically different. For the first time, technology can understand the spaces where we live and work, allowing the physical and digital to merge in ways that were never before possible. Spatial awareness and head-mounted displays also unlock access to users, industries, and spaces that information technology has not traditionally served.

In order to create products and services that fulfill the potential of spatial computing technologies, designers must recognize the limitations of the standard tools we use to design for screens today, and embrace new approaches to product discovery and validation.

In this talk, I share principles that have guided my work with spatial computing technology companies and created measurable value for emerging technology businesses and their users. Show less

Lean startup and user-centered design philosophies hold that businesses should first focus on the user and all else will follow. But the cost and specialized nature of technological innovation means that entrepreneurs are often already invested before they are able to fully explore customer needs. This is especially true for spatial computing technologies-such as augmented reality, Internet of Things, and robotics-which allow access to novel, unfamiliar users and industries that tech has never… Show more

Lean startup and user-centered design philosophies hold that businesses should first focus on the user and all else will follow. But the cost and specialized nature of technological innovation means that entrepreneurs are often already invested before they are able to fully explore customer needs. This is especially true for spatial computing technologies-such as augmented reality, Internet of Things, and robotics-which allow access to novel, unfamiliar users and industries that tech has never before been able to serve.

Spatial computing technologies demand approaches to product development that take customer needs and technological innovation into equal consideration. In this talk, I'll share processes emerging technology businesses can use to assess their technological capabilities, and then use those learnings as a foundation to create powerful hypotheses about where their products can provide measurable value to customers. Show less

With COVID-19 transforming markets across every industry, record numbers of businesses are pivoting to adapt to new customer needs and behaviors. Analysts frame this effort as "less like restarting a business and more like starting a business" (Bain & Company). But in a socially distanced world, many traditional customer learning approaches are no longer possible. With uncertainty still looming, how can you keep your customer learning plan agile and collect accurate, actionable insights, even… Show more

With COVID-19 transforming markets across every industry, record numbers of businesses are pivoting to adapt to new customer needs and behaviors. Analysts frame this effort as "less like restarting a business and more like starting a business" (Bain & Company). But in a socially distanced world, many traditional customer learning approaches are no longer possible. With uncertainty still looming, how can you keep your customer learning plan agile and collect accurate, actionable insights, even when you can't be in the same room with your customers? Show less

Five ways emerging women leaders can lift each other up

Loyal user bases are built through emotion. But it can be difficult to gauge the success of emotional design, as users often have trouble articulating their emotional state during product experiences. Fortunately, there are a growing number of technologies that allow us to read and quantify users’ emotional states in real time, without their having to tell us anything.

At Bing, we seek to inspire users through our daily homepage images, and to delight them with search features that… Show more

Loyal user bases are built through emotion. But it can be difficult to gauge the success of emotional design, as users often have trouble articulating their emotional state during product experiences. Fortunately, there are a growing number of technologies that allow us to read and quantify users’ emotional states in real time, without their having to tell us anything.

At Bing, we seek to inspire users through our daily homepage images, and to delight them with search features that offer elegant solutions for their needs. Using facial electromyography (EMG), we’ve found new ways to tell when we’re successful. Facial EMG reads from the muscle groups of the face to infer when users are enjoying an experience, and when they are frustrated. We’ve learned that delight is measurable, and we’re able to harness this knowledge to thoughtfully and deliberately design experiences that maximize our emotional impact with users. Show less

Llewyn Paine talks about her work designing features with improved engagement for Bing, including the use of biometric research and storytelling.

Panel discussion on Microsoft's search engine, highlighting algorithms, interactive offerings such as Bing Pulse, Rewards, video features and more. Bing is the second largest search engine in the world, designed to help users navigate around the internet quickly and conveniently through features such as the built in search bar and the navigation panes.

The goals in industry are not those of academia, and this means that corporate research needs different things to be successful. Yes, research should be trustworthy and accurate, but in industry this needs to be balanced with timeliness and actionability. An accurate result is worthless if no one knows how to use it, or if no one bothers to read it because they’re struggling to interpret your F-values.

The study at hand employed a pre- versus posttest experimental design to test the effects of television drama Switched at Birth on viewers’ attitudes toward deafness. This program tells the story of two teenage girls (one of whom is deaf) and their struggles to relate to their peers and families after discovering they were switched as newborns. Two hundred eleven female adults completed pre- and postexposure measures utilizing Cooper, Rose, and Mason's (2004) Attitudes to Deafness measure, the… Show more

The study at hand employed a pre- versus posttest experimental design to test the effects of television drama Switched at Birth on viewers’ attitudes toward deafness. This program tells the story of two teenage girls (one of whom is deaf) and their struggles to relate to their peers and families after discovering they were switched as newborns. Two hundred eleven female adults completed pre- and postexposure measures utilizing Cooper, Rose, and Mason's (2004) Attitudes to Deafness measure, the items of which were categorized according to thematic dimensions. After exposure to one of three episodes, viewers’ attitudes toward deafness significantly improved overall, although significant differences in attitude changes varied by episodes and dimensions. The three thematic dimensions that were most strongly represented in the program (social interaction, deafness as a handicap, and language issues) appeared to show the strongest attitude change. Positive attitude changes were observed on social interaction and deafness as handicap dimensions, which was consistent with program content depicting positive deaf-hearing friendships and capable deaf characters. However, attitudes on the language issues dimension showed a negative shift, possibly due to the way that deaf characters communicated with hearing characters onscreen. Show less

The perception of moment-to-moment environmental flux as being composed of meaningful events requires that memory processes coordinate with cues that signify beginnings and endings. We have constructed a technique that allows this coordination to be monitored indirectly. This technique works by embedding a sequential priming task into the event under study. Memory and perception must be coordinated to resolve temporal flux into scenes. The implicit memory processes inherent in sequential… Show more

The perception of moment-to-moment environmental flux as being composed of meaningful events requires that memory processes coordinate with cues that signify beginnings and endings. We have constructed a technique that allows this coordination to be monitored indirectly. This technique works by embedding a sequential priming task into the event under study. Memory and perception must be coordinated to resolve temporal flux into scenes. The implicit memory processes inherent in sequential priming are able to effectively shadow then mirror scene-forming processes. Certain temporal boundaries are found to weaken the strength of irrelevant feature priming, a signal which can then be used in more ambiguous cases to infer how people segment time. Over the course of 13 independent studies, we were able to calibrate the technique and then use it to measure the strength of event segmentation in several instructive contexts that involved both visual and auditory modalities. The signal generated by sequential priming may permit the sense of separation between events to be measured as an extensive psychophysical quantity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved) Show less

A critical function of perception is the organization of temporally spaced input. This is accomplished through grouping, a process by which within-group elements are integrated with one another to form a cohesive unit. Grouping also requires boundaries to set off within-group elements from unrelated stimuli. In the temporal domain, grouping may be accomplished through use of an implicit working memory system that connects temporally spaced information. Temporal group boundaries may be created… Show more

A critical function of perception is the organization of temporally spaced input. This is accomplished through grouping, a process by which within-group elements are integrated with one another to form a cohesive unit. Grouping also requires boundaries to set off within-group elements from unrelated stimuli. In the temporal domain, grouping may be accomplished through use of an implicit working memory system that connects temporally spaced information. Temporal group boundaries may be created by reductions in the default integrative processes of this memory system.

Experiments involving rhythmic groups, spatial shifts, rotations, pitch, and timbre, as well as higher-level conceptual shifts, demonstrated reduced priming in across-boundary conditions. Both visual and auditory events were used, and experiments demonstrated that viewers’ interpretation of a scene contributed to the observed effects. Temporal integration does appear to be reduced at certain event boundaries, suggesting that this may be the general manner in which temporal grouping is accomplished. Motion change, a boundary from event segmentation research, did not reduce priming, indicating that the process presently under study differs from that studied using explicit segmentation procedures.

The reduction of integration may correspond to a subjective, amodal experience of separation. The present technique may therefore offer an objective, implicit method to assess this sense of separation. Using this method, it is possible to reliably determine when people are experiencing temporal group boundaries even when they are not deliberately attending to them. Show less