Tríona Butler Lavery is an Experience Design Lead at Google in London, working as part of the Google AI team. Previously, Tríona was based in California where she worked for over 5 years as a UX lead for Google's home products and experiences. Designing for the home meant building a deep understanding of what'home' means, understanding households, their needs and aspirations in order to define a product strategy in support of this. In her current work, she is exploring a human-centred approach to shape the next generation of AI based products and experiences. AI is spurring a paradigm shift in computing, what is the role of a designer in this new era?

I recently asked Desiree Garcia, designer at IBM, to discuss her experiences in designing for bots, balancing listening to your gut versus listening to stakeholders, and why content-first design is a must. At the O'Reilly Design Conference, Desiree will be presenting a session, Bots may solve some of our problems; here's how they'll put us on the hook for others. What are some of the new challenges bots present for designers? We designers love to talk about empathy all the time and what that means. For creating AI bot technology and bots using AI, I think there's more to building empathy for the user than creating a convincing dialogue, or coming up with ways to help with user frustration if the bot isn't perfect.