Introducing Ken Stern, Director of Customer Experience, Key Lime Interactive
To shape the future of user experience, we must first understand how we got here.
Ken Stern, Director of Customer Experience at Key Lime Interactive, brings over four decades of foundational industry experience to our team. Beginning his career as a Human Factors researcher and lecturer in the late 1970s, Ken spent over 37 years at IBM and IBM iX, leading research practice teams, pioneering usability evaluations, and shaping hardware and software experiences from the mainframe era to modern web ecosystems.
At Key Lime Interactive, Ken’s role spans both our internal research practice and the client experience. Internally, he helps strengthen how we work by tracking research effectiveness, mentoring teams, sharing decades of institutional knowledge, and integrating emerging technologies, such as AI, into our research delivery. Externally, Ken partners with clients and Key Lime teams to ensure research delivers meaningful value, strengthens customer relationships, and translates insight into more informed decisions and experiences.
Here, Ken shares his insights on how UX research has evolved and why its core mission remains unchanged.
Looking back at the start of your career versus today, how has the fundamental ‘problem’ researchers are trying to solve changed?
User experience research evolved from a shift from computer mainframes to the introduction of personal computers and graphical user interfaces, coupled with a focus on Cognitive Psychology, in the late 1970s. Early user experience researchers focused on making computers usable for non-experts. Software interfaces were designed for programmers and trained users, and interacting with a computer required memorizing text commands on command-line (green-screen) interfaces. As personal computers arrived and graphical user interfaces were introduced, usability labs began to focus on how ordinary users expected hardware and software interfaces to work, rather than building interfaces and requiring users to learn how to use them. A novel idea at the time. Back in the day, I was both a designer and a researcher. I designed and tested hardware interfaces ranging from drive-up ATMs to ‘personal printers’, where customers needed to assemble printer components out of the box and figure out how to pour dry toner powder into a cartridge (careful, it stained). The term ‘customer replaceable units’ was in vogue – No service calls required! It became possible to diagnose and replace circuit boards in bank client servers instead of calling for service.
Software interfaces for non-programmers began to emerge. Instead of loading punched cards into a computer, users manually entered text commands or codes. Later, these codes were loaded onto floppy disks that the user inserted into a PC. Graphical user interfaces began to emerge, with users clicking on visual graphics.
Instead of designing interfaces and training humans how to use them, the idea was to design interfaces to work the way that humans expected them to work. Reduce service calls, improve customer setup, reduce learning times, and improve ease of use. User experience research grew from a ‘nice-to-have’ to becoming an integral part of product design to survive in today’s digital markets. Today, bad user experiences drive users away.
Despite the evolution of hardware and software platforms, the focus remains on ensuring that the technology is relevant, usable, understandable, and desirable to targeted and expanded target user bases. Despite advances in technology, prototyping tools, data collection tools, and the integration of AI and machine learning, the fundamental problem UX researchers are trying to solve has not changed since 1980. We continue to focus on closing the gap that exists between what developers, designers, and strategists think users want and need and what users actually need, feel, think, and do.
The evolution continues. We are moving from screen-based interfaces to multimodal, seamless, and personalized experiences. Mental models still guide user expectations. People judge new solutions by the patterns they already know. Users prefer a seamless experience, with interfaces expected to be intuitive and feel invisible. Natural inputs such as voice, biometrics, and gestures are becoming increasingly pervasive. Predictive AI is being introduced to understand and anticipate needs. The goal continues to focus on removing unnecessary digital hurdles and letting users accomplish their intended tasks as easily and directly as possible.
User experience goals have remained the same.
User expectations have evolved.
The best user experience in the past has become the user experience expected in the future. Online shopping, banking, healthcare, and remote work, and rapid advances in technology have created a continued demand to conduct research to observe what users do instead of relying on what they say they want.
COVID-19 changed the execution of user experience (UX) research by shifting research from physical usability labs to remote digital methods. Although in-person and ethnographic research is still needed, in-person labs have been supplanted by remote moderated, unmoderated UX testing, and digital recording tools. Data collection now includes live behavioral analytics, and tagging systems have evolved from single product to multi-device ecosystems. Research cycles have shrunk, and digital methods have expanded the opportunity for global recruitment.
Is research still solving for usability, or has the mission shifted toward something more complex, like trust or emotional endurance?
We are being increasingly exposed to technology that we don’t know how to apply or use effectively. Experiences are becoming personalized and multi-modal. Over-automation and a loss of human connection can leave users feeling frustrated. Trust, privacy, and security issues are increasing. There is a danger of cognitive overload, where users are exposed to too much information, choices, and visual clutter, leading to loss of control, frustration, mental fatigue, and abandonment. Our emotional endurance (capacity to endure stress and discomfort without becoming overwhelmed or disengaged) is being tested.
User experience research is still solving for usability, but the mission and responsibility of user experience research have become more complex. We continue to drive product success and adoption by prioritizing user needs and optimizing intuitive product interaction. However, we are not just validating functions and features with qualitative and quantitative research. We are incorporating a more holistic approach that connects user experience with their journey.
What stands out most is how much UX has changed, and how much its core purpose has stayed the same.
While the technology around us has evolved dramatically, the role of UX research remains remarkably consistent: Understand people, reduce the gap between assumptions and reality, and help create experiences that work the way people expect them to.
What has changed is the complexity of that responsibility. As experiences become more intelligent, personalized, automated, and interconnected, researchers are increasingly helping teams think beyond usability to questions of trust, control, cognitive load, retention, advocacy, and the broader human experience.
The tools will continue to evolve, but keeping people at the center remains the constant.