Generative AI introduces a new kind of user experience — one that is indeterministic, adaptive, and continuously negotiated between human and system. Traditional usability methods, focused on success or failure, often miss what truly defines these encounters: the micro-interactions in which users interpret, question, and build confidence in the AI’s responses.

This session explores how digital ethnography — observing people in their natural digital environments — can uncover the subtle dynamics of trust, expectation, and sense-making that emerge during everyday interaction with generative systems. Drawing on in-context studies of AI tools in real work settings, I’ll show how ethnographic observation reveals patterns of adaptation and judgment that are invisible in controlled testing.

Attendees will leave with practical approaches for studying indeterministic AI experiences through an ethnographic lens — understanding not just what users do, but how they come to trust, doubt, or recalibrate their relationship with intelligent systems over time.