'About Michael Mace
About
Michael Mace
Director of Solution Marketing
UserTesting
Michael Mace is Director of Solution Marketing at UserTesting. He’s a 25-year veteran of the tech industry. In ten years at Apple, he held a variety of strategy and marketing roles, including head of Mac platform marketing and head of the company’s worldwide market research team. At Palm, the mobile computing pioneer, he was VP of long-term product strategy. He also co-founded two startups, and has consulted for companies including Hitachi, Citrix, Adobe, Symantec, and Capella Education.
At UserTesting, he helps companies use and deploy human insight to solve business problems, with a special focus on:
- How AI is changing user behaviour, and what that means for making successful software products
- How to use fast feedback to reduce rework and move faster in design, product, and marketing organisations
- How to safely scale/democratise human insight without creating quality problems
Talk topic
Designing software people can trust: The new rules of user experience
For decades, we’ve designed software as a tool: people control it with taps and swipes, and usability is the central measure of a good experience. AI changes that equation. As we have conversations with software and ask it to do tasks on our behalf, people start judging the experience more like a relationship. They ask: Can I trust it? Does it understand me? Am I still in control? And do I want to come back?
This creates new challenges for everyone working on software. How do we design our products for relationship? And how do we know if those relationships are working well? Much of the conversation about AI has focused on models, productivity, hallucination, and governance. This session focuses on the human side. Drawing on new research and real-world examples, we'll examine the five factors that shape the new human-software relationship: trust, understanding, control, outcomes, and affinity. We'll explore why those factors matter, how they can vary across markets, and practical ways to measure and improve them.
The audience will leave with a framework for creating AI experiences that earn adoption and confidence, not just attention.
Designing software people can trust: The new rules of user experience
For decades, we’ve designed software as a tool: people control it with taps and swipes, and usability is the central measure of a good experience. AI changes that equation. As we have conversations with software and ask it to do tasks on our behalf, people start judging the experience more like a relationship. They ask: Can I trust it? Does it understand me? Am I still in control? And do I want to come back?
This creates new challenges for everyone working on software. How do we design our products for relationship? And how do we know if those relationships are working well? Much of the conversation about AI has focused on models, productivity, hallucination, and governance. This session focuses on the human side. Drawing on new research and real-world examples, we'll examine the five factors that shape the new human-software relationship: trust, understanding, control, outcomes, and affinity. We'll explore why those factors matter, how they can vary across markets, and practical ways to measure and improve them.
The audience will leave with a framework for creating AI experiences that earn adoption and confidence, not just attention.
