182 / How ‘Sense Shape Steer’ Helps UXers Design AI Solutions, with Bansi Mehta

In this episode of Product Momentum, we’re joined by Bansi Mehta, founder and CEO of Koru UX Design, an enterprise healthcare UX agency supporting some of the US’s largest healthcare technology companies. We discussed the busy intersection of artificial intelligence, product management, and UX Design. Bansi’s Sense – Shape – Steer framework helps guide UX design teams as they integrate AI into their products – and avoid the trap of AI’s drive toward mediocrity that limits individual creativity and expertise.

Here’s what we learned:

Avoiding the Trap: AI Solutions’ Race to Mediocrity

AI’s ability to rapidly generate hi-fi prototypes and voluminous content brings great benefit, but also significant risk. The risk manifests in mediocrity – i.e., solutions that drive to the mean. This sense of “good enough” stifles designer creativity and diminishes the quality – the Delight – of the final product.

“The speed of AI makes it easier than ever to churn screens,” Bansi says. “But it’s designed to deliver to that average mean that allows us to say, ‘that works, that makes sense.’ And that’s really the trap….these days, there’s less patience in the industry for discovery and research.”

Introducing the Sense – Shape – Steer Framework

To combat this new reality, Bansi developed the Sense – Shape – Steer framework to help teams navigate the complexity of building AI-powered products.

• Sense. Understanding the Problem/Opportunity.
  “Sense is where you’re really creating that sense of what is worth solving,” Bansi explains. “It’s the intersection of what the user needs, what insights we have in terms of their challenges, and the opportunities that are present. But we mustn’t stop there. We then look to see what AI can do for us. And where we see the intersection, that’s the sweet spot.”
• Shape. Designing the AI-Enhanced User Experience.
  We emerge from the Sense step with rich insights into our user’s desired experience, Bansi continues. “And as we approach Shape, we do so with an emphasis on the kind of UX challenge that we are trying to solve – from the user’s perspective. Using a storyboard, we proceed frame by frame to define the user’s journey, the problem that we are trying to accomplish.”
• Steer. Implementing, Evaluating, and Iterating.
  The Steer step comes once you have built something and you launched, Bansi says. “This is where we define and clearly articulate our AI eval criteria that we’ve said are critical for product success,” Bansi adds. “I’ve seen products make it or break it depending on whether they got their AI evals right. It’s one thing to hypothesize that your solution will work. But it’s a completely different thing when you actually try to build sophisticated agentic AI layers where there’s multiple configurations and prompts.”  

Broader Insights, Future Outlook

The conversation underscores the notion that while AI accelerates development and content generation, it also requires subject matter experts in UX and Product to demonstrate greater vigilance than ever to maintain quality and relevance. The Sense – Shape – Steer framework calls on product teams to think first about user needs before considering whether and how to integrate AI.

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Our episode with Bansi Mehta feels like the capstone conversation to recent episodes with Nesrine Changuel, Teresa Torres, and Oji Udezue, where we examined bringing Delight to the user experience, re-engaging Discovery in the development process, and adjusting to the Speed of today’s AI-driven development.

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