This World Usability Day brings us the theme: 'Emerging technology and human experience'. Web Usability’s Director Lucy Collins reflects on what this means in practice, exploring how the rapid growth of AI and automation is shaping the way we design, use and trust digital services.
I had the joy of trying to reset the master password for our AWS account recently after losing access to an authenticator app. What should have been a simple process turned into an endless loop with an AI chatbot that insisted it could help but never actually did. It greeted me politely, predicted my question, and still managed to make me feel completely invisible. It might have understood what I wanted, but it certainly didn’t see the human shouting at the screen or the one pacing round the garden to calm down afterwards.
Moments like this remind me that for all the technological progress we have made, people still end up feeling frustrated, unseen or uncertain online. We are building digital tools that claim to make life easier, yet too often they make it harder to trust the systems that shape our lives.
This year’s World Usability Day theme, Emerging Technologies and Human Experience, could not be more relevant. The day celebrates how good design and usability improve lives and invites us to reflect on whether new technologies are genuinely enhancing human experience. The question is not what these tools can do, but whether we trust them to do it well and for the right reasons.
At its core, usability has always been about trust. A service can look great and work flawlessly, but if people do not feel safe sharing information or do not believe the system understands them, then it is not really usable. Trust is the quiet foundation on which good digital experiences are built.
And trust is not evenly spread. Some people have every reason to doubt digital systems. When technology consistently misunderstands or excludes you, caution becomes self-protection. I have seen this many times in our research at Web Usability. Blind users whose screen readers cannot announce forms clearly, or people with physical disabilities who cannot complete a purchase because of a single incorrectly labelled button that fails to respond to speech recognition software. These are not isolated experiences. They highlight a wider problem in how we build technology. Technology alone is not to blame. It reflects our choices and priorities.
When inclusion is treated as an optional extra rather than a starting point, we end up creating systems that work beautifully for some and badly for others. We chase efficiency and automation, often at the expense of empathy and fairness.
Artificial intelligence has sharpened this tension. On the positive side, AI can support inclusion in remarkable ways. Real-time captioning, adaptive text, automated translation and voice interfaces have opened up access for many. These tools are exciting, but they also risk creating an illusion of empathy. AI can analyse what we do but not why we do it. It can mimic conversation but not care.
There is a temptation to let technology handle the human parts for us. It’s convenient to believe automation can make experiences inclusive by default. But inclusion cannot be automated. True usability still relies on listening to real people, understanding their needs and involving them in design. Without that, we are creating for data points, not for humans.
The next evolution of usability will not be about speed or complexity. It will be about belief. We used to define usability as making things simple. Now it is about making things understandable, transparent and worthy of trust.
In one of our recent projects, a client watched users struggle with a process they assumed was straightforward. You could see the moment of realisation. It was not just a design issue, it was a trust issue. People were unsure whether the system would behave as expected. That single session changed how the client thought about their service. Research like this turns data into empathy, and empathy into better design.
World Usability Day is a reminder that technology’s purpose is not to impress us but to include us. Emerging technologies can either deepen or close the trust gap. The difference lies in our intent. We need to stop asking “What can this technology do?” and start asking “Who could it leave behind?”
If we want people to trust technology, we have to earn that trust. We do it by involving them early, listening to their feedback and designing with care. When people feel heard, they feel safe. And when they feel safe, they trust.
Emerging technologies will continue to change how we live, work and connect. But the real test of usability has never been how well systems work. It is how well they work for people. That is what will make the digital world truly usable and truly human.