{"id":4114,"date":"2026-01-12T08:00:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T13:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/matlab\/?p=4114"},"modified":"2026-04-15T19:05:58","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T23:05:58","slug":"mathworks-user-experience-group-a-long-history-of-focusing-on-customers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/matlab\/2026\/01\/12\/mathworks-user-experience-group-a-long-history-of-focusing-on-customers\/","title":{"rendered":"How User Research Shaped MathWorks\u2019 New AI Quick Answers Feature"},"content":{"rendered":"
Today\u2019s guest blogger is <\/span>David Marshall.<\/span><\/a> David is a User Experience Researcher supporting MathWorks Online Products, including the Community, Help Center, and search. In this blog he describes his recent experience supporting the new AI-generated Quick Answers feature, recently made available in our Help Center search.<\/span><\/div>

Mathworks user experience (UX) group<\/span><\/h2>
Long before the popular design tool Figma was a figment of people\u2019s imagination, when the internet was still called the \u201cinformation superhighway\u201d, MathWorks had a <\/span>User Experience Group<\/span><\/a>. We\u2019ve grown since then - to over 100 people around the world, striving to understand our customers and design great experiences. We specialize in research and design, and work closely with developers to ensure that our products aren\u2019t just useful, but are also easy to use. <\/span><\/div>
So what does this work actually look like? You may have read <\/span>Mike Croucher\u2019s blog post<\/span><\/a> about the new generative AI feature in Help Center search, or recently experienced it for yourself. In this post, I\u2019ll share the UX journey that brought Quick Answers from concept to reality. It's a great case study of how an idea is tested with users and refined before becoming a fully-baked feature that is ready to ship. <\/span><\/div>

Case Study: Adding generative AI to <\/span>Help Center Search<\/span><\/h2>
The project kicked off with a desire to explore how AI could improve the experience of searching MathWorks Documentation - but we started with more questions than answers. This is an exciting moment for a researcher: it\u2019s our business to ask useful questions, then go about answering them. So we started to chip away, 1 at a time, knowing that each would lead to new insights, discoveries, and of course questions to explore. Below are the questions we asked along the way, as well as what we learned. <\/span><\/div>

Question 1: Why do people come to the MathWorks website?<\/span><\/h3>
Part of a UX researcher\u2019s role is to keep the customer\u2019s perspective front and center, as it\u2019s often different from how people think about and use our products internally. When it comes to Documentation, previous research tells us that user goals fall into two broad categories:<\/span><\/div>