AI is changing the UX of news products
Product & Tech Initiative Blog | 25 June 2024
It’s becoming more and more apparent that AI is changing a vast range of things for us news media. At Google IO, multimodality was mentioned numerous times (almost as many as AI!). Very soon we’ll be in a world where we can switch modes at the touch of a button, click of a mouse, or a voice command.
What does that mean for our UX?
The News Product Alliance ran a Webinar recently with Nikita Roy of Newsroom Robots on the AI of UX. Nikita gave some great examples of AI and UX, so I wanted to share a few of these with you:
Politico runs AI summaries of legislation documents, which makes it easier for people to understand (for Pro subscribers only).
YouTube summarises and groups comments; see below.
- Ippen allows you to choose how you want to read, either a long article or click on a button to read the summary. This reminds me of Artifact doing different summarisations last year.
- Der Spiegel has a browser plugin that allows readers to give more context to a word or phrase, which is derived from the Der Spiegel archive.
- The Newsroom App uses AI to give you the top five news events based on what people are talking about. It gives different sources including progressive, moderate, and conservative.
- Chatbots are, of course, a huge change in UX, which we covered in depth here (what to think about, how to build, data loop, cost, and RoI) and here (chatbots and users).
As I’ve written before, we may need to go further when thinking about UX, particularly as we see audio and video becoming more prominent. We’re already seeing changes with Google and Apple’s announcements, which may affect how consumers reach us.
So much is changing right now that we don’t know the answers, but there is a lot of excellent experimentation going on. If you are doing something original with your UX, we’d love to hear about it. You can reach me at Jodie.hopperton@INMA.org.
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