Bethany Faulkner
Bethany Faulkner
Staff Product Designer @ Pocket Prep
Bethany is a product designer, identity crafter, and difficult-question-asker with over 10 years building digital products, brands, and websites for Fortune 500 companies, agencies, and first-time founders. She now works as a Staff Product Designer in ed-tech, making education more accessible at Pocket Prep. She is always looking to elevate ethics and humanity in design and tech.
Desirable Difficulties
The seductive promise of AI is to remove project ambiguity for us, turning foggy data into confident answers on demand. But the messy in-between is sometimes where meaning is made: for our users, and for us as product designers.
This talk focuses on a case study of one ed-tech feature that took over a year of murky, often disappointing, "is this even working?" experimentation. Our conclusion was based on data-driven findings, yes, but human values determined the feature's final shape in a way that neither AI nor the data alone could have. We'll explore the space between handing users the answers and giving them the tools to find their own, and how sitting with the uncomfortable unknown can be the wisest, most productive thing we can do, as users and designers both.
