How Cognitive Computing Could Dramatically Alter the User Experience

As applications become smarter and more adaptive, user experience is about to undergo a massive change, one that will make the way we interact with our computers and devices a lot more natural. For IBM, whose Watson cognitive computing platform powers a variety of applications, the goal is to turn human-computer interaction into a conversation that's similar to one between two people. "I would say a sentence and Watson would understand not just what I'm saying but what's the intention of what I'm saying," says Melanie Butcher, the program director of the Commerce UX Design Studio at IBM. She's helping to develop products that could allow a marketer to plan and execute an entire campaign through a conversation with a Watson-powered software assistant. But this isn't just a vision of a Star Trek computer that understands questions and voice commands based on context; it's one that also allows for applications that feed information gathered from the user's behaviour back into the app to help guide the user through its functions. "If somebody is in a screen and they're kind of clicking around and they click on help and they search for something but they close it right away, it's clear that they're a little frustrated," she says. The application could then use that information to offer help based on what the user was searching for and what they were trying to do before they got frustrated.