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For Part 1 (3 Points): How should researchers and developers prioritize between pushing the boundaries of technology and addressing practical user needs when developing knowledge graph-powered applications? Include the potential benefits and drawbacks of focusing primarily on technological innovation versus user-centered design in your answer.
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For Part 2 (2 Points): After submitting your initial response, select a peer’s response. Do you agree or disagree with your peer’s prioritization between technological innovation and user-centered design? Why? Your answer should be respectful, constructive, and include evidence supporting your perspective.
Considering the focus on advancements by Kejriwal and Orr and the emphasis on user-centered design and commonsense reasoning by Diefenbach,
The interesting part of this question, is to first establish a definition of what is ‘technological innovtion’ and what is ‘user-centered design’ as these do not have to be mutually exclusive.
User-centered design focuses on the needs of the user at every stage of the design process. Sometimes, technological innovation requires that users learn how to think and use new tools in novel ways that they had never thought of before.
When Adobe created Photoshop for example, they had to stage training sessions across the globe to train graphic artists in how to use the functions such as layering, masking as well as algorithmic transformations such as solarizing, rasterizing, etc. Many companies such as Adobe are constantly straddling the line between making tools that are usable, versus adding new features. They also had to invest a lot in training users in how to use their product.
Social media is an example of another web innovation that required users to learn to use the new tool including learning the new etiquette of the web.
While knowledge graphs are not specifically mentioned in this question, it would seem the implication of the question is that knowledge graph technology is a ‘technological innovation’. Where knowledge graphs intersect with users is a constant challenge for the creators of tools for people to use to build knowledge graphs as well as how to visualize, search and use graphs.
When a knowledge graph supports the architecture of a system, it’s possible that a user-centered design won’t even require a user to know they are interacting with a graph, but they can trace results given by graphs because of the nature of how graphs connect data.
User-centered interfaces such as GPT chat interfaces seem highly user-centered and are quite technologicially innovative, however they cannot always be trusted to provide useful answers that haven’t just been hallucinated by the system. This is a tricky problem as users can come to trust knowledge from such a system, but the users often have no way of checking the output. For this reason, many people are now looking at ways to integrate knowledge graphs with LLM/GPT technology so that users can benefit from the simplicity of a chat interface while also trusting and tracing the responses given by a system back to some ground truth.
I designed ImageSnippets with developers to construct an interface for users to build knowledge graphs with no code. The interface design has taken the user into consideration throughout the entire process, but it also redefines the notion of what a digital asset manager can be that has it’s fundamental core, an architecture built around a knowledge graph.
Conceptually, the challenge is in not just teaching users how to think about knowledge graphs - but especially how to think about and use knowledge graphs that form a metadata centric asset management system/metadata management system.
User cent
Human-centered factors are always needed to be considered seriously in technology. Researchers , developers, and users and technology, how to balance them is a good topic. Traditional researchers and developers may fall into the misunderstanding of only pursuing technological innovation and ignoring users.
The benefit of focusing on technology is that technology is always the key point to stay competitive on the market. However, ignoring users can limit the impact of the state-of-the-art technology.
The benefit of focusing on users ensures that the application solves tangible problems. However, overemphasis on user needs might limit exploration into more advanced technology.
It is quite important to balance them and clarify the needs.
I totally agree with you that technological innovation and user-centered design do not have to be mutually exclusive and that the balance between the two is crucial. Balancing the two is less about prioritizing one over the other and more about contextually adapting the approach to meet the needs of the system and its users.