AI for UX

Chapter 2. Auditing Your Workflow to Identify Where AI Can Help

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Before you can fix something broken, you need to see it clearly. Auditing workflows is like detective work; you pull at threads until hidden knots come to light. If you’re anything like me, each task becomes a chance to apply the design framework, and this workflow will be no exception. You’ll gather data in your auditing workflow before forming a complete hypothesis on how to solve the problems affecting your team.

When I first began doing workflow audits, I expected to find small annoyances. There might be a little copy-paste here or a couple of unnecessary meetings there. What I didn’t anticipate was discovering entire workweeks disappearing, often in areas no one had noticed. My team had a quarterly planning schedule that required a lot of people from different departments to attend. The larger the meeting, the less productive it became for the individual attendees—and I found one that was especially problematic. Six hours over two days, with more than one hundred attendees split between ...