Artificial intelligence is no longer a buzzword. It's a reality. See how you can use it to inform great user experience and great native ads.
Artificial Intelligence (or AI) can still seem like a magic trick to most of us but really it is nothing but complex machine language. AI is no longer just a hot buzzword in sci-fi novels; it has come to life and is in practice, among other things, informing spectacular user experience.
AI aside, digitization, in general, is the biggest reality of the times we live in. User experience design (UX), naturally, is at the core of all these digital experiences, and heavily influences the value humans ascribe to them.
These are exciting times because the forces of AI and UX design are fusing together, reinforcing each other, and paving the way for a digitally powered present and future.
Image Credit: microsoft.com
Let's take a look at how, for the future and now, AI is designing a better user experience.
The average attention span of the human brain, as a much-talked-about Microsoft-sponsored study revealed, is 8 seconds (less than that of a goldfish). At any given instant, humans face a lot of choices, whether it’s a decision that affects their lives, or a decision that simply governs their app experience.
AI has a significant role to play here, primarily by reducing the number of choices a user has. And AI does so by predicting the choice a user is likely to make, and in this manner, eliminating decision points.
Machine learning-powered predictive data analysis – that’s the technology UX designers are interested in. This can help them develop digital experiences that seem to be running on ‘artificial intelligence' to the human users, because they always seem to be getting what they wanted from the digital entity, without specifying everything explicitly.
Let’s understand this with an example. Airbnb’s success is mostly attributed to the willingness of property owners to be onboard. This, in turn, depends greatly on the seamless and empowering user experience that the Airbnb digital platform offers property owners. This, in turn, draws heavily from AI; here’s how.
Property owners don’t want their spaces to go unrented because they priced them too high, nor do they want to leave money on the table by underpricing them. Airbnb’s ‘Price Tips’ feature uses AI, takes a lot of factors into account (locality, day of the month, demand versus supply, listing type, availability, etc.) and helps property owners adjust their rents to the ideal value (low enough to be rented, and not too low so as to leave money on the table).
AI systems have been creating a deep understanding and connection with humans, and all this is happening due to the analysis of oceans of data. The quality of the relationship between human and artificial intelligence is getting enhanced because of this unprecedented number-crunching.
The idea of talking to one’s smartphone might have sounded weird a decade back. Today, voice assistants are an integral part of the human-smartphone relationship. Take 'Siri', for example. You hear 'Siri' as a digital personal assistant with a friendly voice. Similarly, Amazon's 'Alexa' is another great application of deep human understanding. The two AI-based applications are able to understand and interpret your voice to assist you. Apart from this, the apps also study your pattern and smartly predict your behaviour.
This is exactly how an AI UX works. Web users engage with an application, it collects their usage data and uses algorithms to develop a pattern and learn more. It then uses this data and learning to give users a better user interface.
Till the past few years, simple tools & metrics were used to develop a user interface. UX teams utilized heat maps, usage data, A/B tests and usability tests which sometimes produced vague results that resulted in even vaguer user interfaces.
But, with the advancements in AI, it is easy to gauge a user's behaviour and then provide an interactive user experience. E-commerce sites leverage this AI-powered capability to enhance user experiences and then come up with suggestions of something that shoppers would like to buy. How do they get the information?! It's only by studying usage data.
The deep insights facilitated by advanced data analyses can be used to improve user experiences, which in turn can drive up e-commerce success KPIs, such as customer loyalty, SEO, digital marketing, and sales.
There have been common beliefs about what sets AI apart from humans on an emotional front, and it's not just a gap, but a canyon! Somehow, developers have taken this challenge by the scruff of its neck and have come up with emotion-AI.
Emotion AIs use machine learning algorithms, data and facial recognition software to gauge the behaviour of a human being. The AI system then undergoes 'training', in which it analyzes tons of images (both facial and emotional).
After this rigorous process and a few failures later, the AI is able to successfully categorize user responses into different categories. These emotional categories can be happy, sad, angry, or frustrated.
Well, you must be wondering what else AI can do in the future.
We may not be too far from a future in which all you need to do is snap your finger or just say the word and your thoughts will be transferred to a computer counterpart. AI systems are getting more user-friendly with every passing day. Very soon, we might not be able to go on about our day without their help.
No Comments Yet
Let us know what you think