Hyper Personal: AI, UX and the Dawn of Dynamic Knowledge Rendering

As I sit here battling some kind of illness, I see a new blog pop up from Lee Mallon, exploring whether we should be sending Large Language Models into space to teach aliens about us. My eyes aren’t really working and my foggy brain isn’t going to be able to translate what my eyes are seeing into any form of cognitive thought, so I open up LinkedIn’s Immersive Reader. The reader loads the article into fullscreen mode with big beautiful letters, when you press play it reads the article out to you highlighting each word so you can read along.

The beauty of this seamless interaction means I can consume the content in a way that works best for me, at the specific time I am consuming it. Perhaps un-ironically this happened to be one of many pieces of content Lee has put together which explores Dynamic Knowledge Rendering.

Dynamic Knowledge Rendering

The idea behind Dynamic Knowledge Rendering (DKR), a term coined by Lee, is that the content you consume is adapted and delivered in a format and style that makes the most sense to you. For me, at this time, this was a simple article in the form of a piece of audio content, however, this could easily have been an AI-generated video for the more visual learners. Next-level DKR goes beyond this.

Tailored learning

As a User Experience (UX) agency we do a lot of work in the eLearning space, with in-depth research into the needs of the learners. If we could create the course to be delivered dynamically to meet the needs of the learner, the impact would be immeasurable.

For me personally, replacing reams of reading with audio-visual content would have a massive impact on my learning outcomes. By going one step beyond the delivery mechanism into considering the different facets of who I am as a person (my learning style, level of understanding, when I last did a bit of relevant learning and what the content of that learning was), would enable me to learn at a much faster pace. By implementing a DKR system, the learning experience could adapt to this by drawing on the users interests to create relevant metaphors. To quote Ruben from the film Road Trip “I can teach Japanese to a chimp in 46 hours. You just have to find a way to relate the material”. Ruben then goes on to teach philosophy to Josh utilising pro wrestling metaphors. If we can make learning hyper personal, we can make it relevant, enjoyable and as a result increase retention of the material.

Adopting the Perfect Pet

One area where we see personalised experiences being utilised is in e-commerce. We are recommended products not only based on things we have previously bought but also on things we have looked at. It is so effective, 35% of Amazons product sales are generated purely from product recommendations (Mckinsey, 2013).

DKR can take this one step further. Imagine you are looking to adopt a pet dog and you land on an adoption site. Rather than giving you a complex strew of pages to navigate, the website could instead deliver a 5-minute video with the dogs that are currently available to adopt. This selection of dogs along with the information that is shared about them would be based on your previous pet history and factors from your personal life, such as whether you live in a house or an apartment. This goes beyond the current experience of “you have looked at poodles you must just want to see poodles”.

Now, someone else who lands on this site could be given a completely different experience. Different dogs and formatted in a completely different way, possibly in the form of a 500-word blog post with short fact files on each dog.

What does this mean for user experience and accessibility?

From a user experience standpoint, we have to start looking at the experiences we create as living designs that need to have the flexibility to adapt to the unique needs of individual users. This means that accessibility becomes the experience, rather than a second thought, which sadly is the case for many organisations. The thought process will no longer be, how can we make this content accessible to the visually impaired, the content will dynamically adapt to the user based on the preferences created within their digital persona; whether its preference or an accessibility requirement.

Forget winter, change is coming

There is no denying that this is going to create a huge paradigm shift and there is no telling how far we are from seeing DKR take its true form. The first step has to be a mindset change as to how we see the online world. We have transitioned from accessing content through web 1.0 and creating content for web 2.0, whether Dynamic Knowledge Rendering is web 3 or 4 ultimately doesn’t matter, but it is the natural destination. At least for this leg of the journey.

At Elixel we are continuing our focus on designing experiences for people in all their fantastic forms and see DKR as a big opportunity to create impactful experiences that aren’t bound by the limitations of time and budgets.

I personally can’t wait to see this unfold and hopefully be part of the transition to a more personalised digital world.