Designing with Intelligence and Integrity
The Intersection of UX and AI
While AI can reveal patterns and insights, human intuition, along with empathy and creativity, are irreplaceable qualities that contribute to truly understanding user needs and behaviors.
It’s essential to maintain a focus on human-centered design principles when integrating AI in UX research. Collaborating closely with end-users throughout the research process ensures that design decisions are grounded in real human experiences.
Where UX Meets AI
Four Key Considerations
Emotional Insight
Context Awareness
Human Judgment
Bias Check
From Pattern Recognition to People Understanding
AI can rapidly surface patterns, cluster feedback, and summarize insights, but it often misses the emotional undercurrents and cultural nuances of user behavior. That’s where UX professionals step in. By blending AI’s velocity with human empathy, we ensure research leads to real, ethical design decisions. Our process is focused on enhancing, not replacing, human understanding in the product development lifecycle.
How We Integrate AI Into UX Research
Explore how AI fits into the research journey. From stakeholder analysis to emotional design validation, here’s how we integrate AI tools with intentional UX practices.
Onboarding Analysis
AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity review project documents to quickly summarize objectives, risks, and assumptions. Human researchers validate findings and align them to project strategy.
Interview Insights
Upload transcripts into tools like Dovetail or ChatGPT to identify recurring themes and emotions. Researchers step in to re-label vague tags, clarify emotional context, and prevent misinterpretation.
Persona Development
Use AI to enrich draft personas, simulate behavior in different scenarios, and refine based on deeper motivations, not just demographics. Human input ensures these personas stay grounded in real user goals.
Journey Mapping
Instead of mapping based only on existing data, we use GPT-enhanced personas to simulate how a user might respond in unclear journey stages. This helps fill in gaps, validate emotional responses, and ensure design outcomes stay aligned to core motivations and values.
Emotional Signal Detection
AI flags patterns of frustration or satisfaction. It shows trends across users. Humans step in to decide what actually matters, where intervention is needed, and how to respond through design.
Transparency & Ethics
AI should never be a black box. We keep stakeholders informed on when and how AI is used in research, always reinforcing that it’s a support tool, not a decision-maker.
Our Approach to Human-Centered AI Research
Accelerated Discovery
Rapidly summarize project briefs, user feedback, and competitive data to get up to speed faster.
Emotionally Intelligent Personas
Go beyond surface-level personas by integrating emotional triggers, value systems, and scenario-based simulations.
Ethical Integration
We prioritize transparency and ethical oversight, ensuring AI augments design without replacing empathy.
Integrate AI into Your User Experience
Looking to improve the user experience of your applications or digital systems? Let’s explore how AI can ethically support your research and design initiatives. Whether you’re just beginning to test AI in your workflow or looking to scale your efforts, we’ll help you combine speed, strategy, and empathy to drive better outcomes.
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Meet Kassie Gibbons, UX Designer
Kassie Gibbons is a UX Designer at RBA who specializes in integrating emerging technology into user research practices. At the Minnesota Technology Association’s annual Tech Connect 2025, Kassie delivered a thought-provoking session on the ethical use of artificial intelligence in user experience design. Her talk explored real-world applications of tools like ChatGPT, Dovetail, and Perplexity, while emphasizing the importance of human oversight in interpreting tone, validating emotional signals, and building realistic personas. Through the lens of a fictional case study, “Sith Happens”, Kassie illustrated how AI can accelerate UX workflows while maintaining ethical rigor and empathy in design.