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Soft Skills, Hard Tech: AI is an inherently human experience that can't be faked
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April 10, 2025
Key Points
Cyriac Zeh, Senior Product Designer at Microsoft highlights the role of user feedback in refining AI products for better CS.
Microsoft prioritizes gradual changes in search features, influenced by user feedback and competition.
The integration of Copilot into search aims to provide precise and clear information, reflecting a shift in search strategies
We're moving away from the old way of searching to new ways, and this will be a very big change. But if we do it too quickly without thinking about users, it will disrupt the whole user experience that people are already used to.
Cyriac Zeh
Sr. Product Designer | Microsoft
As much as we’d like to pigeonhole AI into being purely machinery or something categorically inhuman, AI can very often offer a 'feeling' experience. There are non-quantifiable soft skills within AI and a human element that can't be faked. Even though we are headed towards a more agentic future, AI, for all its power, is still not exempt from great CX.
According to Cyriac Zeh, Sr. Product Designer at Microsoft, at the heart of the biggest changes in search, and tooling that powers most people and companies, is user experience and making sure users feel validated in their daily use of AI.
A matter of competition: "Imagine you're designing a product that has a really low usability. Users quickly get frustrated when something is not working the way they expect," explains Zeh in a recent phone interview. "If users think a flow should work one way and then it's actually layered differently, it makes things much more difficult for them. And since it's a very competitive market, you want to build a product that makes users happy and want to come back."
UX at the heart of design: Zeh emphasizes that user feedback drives the iterative design process at Microsoft. "In my job, I always make sure to talk to users and see how they feel about using any product I'm working on. Based off the feedback, I would then iterate and make the product better. That's a process that most experienced user experience designers follow just to make sure the product makes users happy. And that's something we really care about."
The changes cannot be drastic. They have to be based on the feedback we get from users.
Cyriac Zeh
Sr. Product Designer | Microsoft
No drastic changes: Despite being an industry giant, Microsoft can't simply implement sweeping changes overnight. "A company as big as Microsoft has eyes open on things that are happening and what users want. But we can't just make changes in the blink of an eye because somebody else is doing something. We have to think about so many things and what will be affected in order to make those big drastic decisions," Zeh notes.
This is particularly true for search, which Zeh describes as "extremely important" and a significant revenue generator for both Bing and Microsoft Edge. "The changes cannot be drastic. They have to be based on the feedback we get from users," he says.
Search changes: While Microsoft follows its existing roadmap of requested features, Zeh acknowledges the influence of newer players in the search space. "A new startup called Perplexity is really good at how search should look for most people. I think that's probably going to be the direction most search engines will go—moving from having this stack of links you have to go through to find specific information, to having something that's very precise, concise, and clear."
This vision is already influencing Microsoft's strategy, and Zeh references the integration of Copilot into the search experience. "If you're looking for specific information, you can have a chat window that will help you quickly find what you're looking for," Zeh explains.
Calculated change: Looking ahead, Zeh predicts significant changes to search in the coming months, but stresses the importance of a gradual transition. "We're moving away from the old way of searching to new ways, and this will be a very big change. But if we do it too quickly without thinking about users, it will disrupt the whole user experience that people are already used to. So we have to do it gradually and follow up with the feedback users provide in terms of the experience and how they want to interact with the product."
