You don’t to be an oracle to tell that artificial intelligence (AI) will change our future lives. In fact, for decades humanity has dreamed of robots and technology, or ubiquitous virtual assistants who accompany us through life making our lives easier.

These dreams are slowly becoming a reality thanks to our rapidly advancing technological advances in artificial intelligence.

Big tech companies like Google, IBM, or Facebook have already grasped this topic and are passionately working on it. Since 2016, Google’s corporate motto has been “AI First.” So it’s high time for companies to start implementing AI in UX/UI Design and get something useful out of it.

• How can we use AI to make products and services even more user-friendly?
• What UX design principles apply to AI-based products and services?
• What is the role of a UX designer in the development of this technology?
• How can we ensure a decent future with AI?

What is UX?

Today any product (the physical or digital one) should offer a convenient, user-oriented design. No one will like a product if it takes too long to figure out how to use it. Any product should offer an intuitive and inspiring interface and seamless user experience from start to finish. This is exactly what UX designers are responsible for. Generally speaking, they make lives easier for those who use mobile apps, websites, and other digital services.

To better understand their future users, UX designers conduct different observations and surveys as well as process many data that tracks users` behavior on the website or app. They later combine these results and create target personas. This allows them quickly and repeatedly catering services or products to specific audiences.

But how AI can help?

Here’s How AI Solutions Can Improve UX

As mentioned before, user experience is defined through extensive testing. Many users test a product and then, based on this data or surveys, designers define what can be optimized and what works perfectly. The use of artificial intelligence has a similar goal – to better understand human behavior based on algorithms and other automation tools.

Artificial intelligence is typically used to track how users use an app or website. It offers a wide range of extensive data such as user flow on the app, devices that users use to get to your product, exit pages, time sessions, etc. These data are then evaluated and analyzed by the AI.

Essentially, the more data available, the better the AI can learn.

New Capabilities for Better User Interaction

Nowadays, we can find AI everywhere in our daily lives: smartphones, watches, smart homes, cars, and smart voice friends like Alexa, Siri, and Google Home. It helps to guide pilots on an airplane or steersmen on a sailboat.

For UX designers, it controls design systems, automatically creates interfaces including code from sketches, or retouches images in Photoshop.

At the end of the day, it also saves time and opens up creative solutions for those who lack them.

AI is not only about automation and huge data processing; combined with sophisticated machine learning, it gives us, humans, incredibly practical benefits.

This is where the greatest opportunities and possibilities lie for UX, namely predictive and anticipatory design.

Anticipatory Design

By definition, Anticipatory is a design discipline that focuses on creating automated, predictive content that is not just reactive, but basically proactive and on a large scale.

The predictive design combines the Internet of Things, AI, machine learning, and UX design. The goal of this design is to learn and understand user behavior to the extent that it can anticipate their needs and initiate appropriate actions. This provides great opportunities to offer an incredibly useful user experience.

It has been proven that we make an average of 35,000 decisions in our minds every day. The mental stress that affects us daily negatively affects our ability to make good decisions and ultimately leaves us depressed. With AI, we can now design products and services in the spirit of anticipatory design, which spares us from decisions and therefore decrease mental stress and free up time for more important things.

Examples of Anticipatory Design for Better UX

Countless examples already benefit from anticipatory design. Some anticipatory UX applications can already be found in our daily lives.

Spotify knows what we want to listen to. Netflix, what we want to watch. Nest adjusts the right temperature for us. Google and Whatsapp offer automatic responses to messages or give us recommendations for action.

Many e-commerce shops allow us to choose products in just a few clicks based on what we purchased in the past. The more users use your product, the more personalized offers it gives them.

In this context, the term “adaptive UX” is already changing the way we experience certain products and services.

AI allows adapting product interfaces even better and more precisely to a variety of contexts and needs to generate maximum results with minimal user involvement.

The Role of the UX Designer in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The opinions about AI have split into two factions. Some see AI as a utopian future with fully automotive labor and many other benefits, some treat it as a potentially disruptive technology with constant data leakage, unemployment, etc.

UX designers are somewhere in the middle. Their job is to ensure that people and their needs are always at the center. And here is how they use AI to address it.

AI Chatbots: Man Asks, Bot Answers

AI software development is showing its strengths, especially when it comes to inquiries to a company: chatbots automate customers` requests to more accurately interpret incidents and inquiries before they make their way into service management department.

As the technology matures, positive effects, such as improved usability and user experience, become apparent. In the short term, technology certainly won’t replace humans but in the medium term, it will gradually reduce the need for manual intervention and make customer support teams` work much easier.

Intelligent Search for Better User Interaction

Designers and web developers can use artificial intelligence to optimize their website search functions. Many customers use different search terms in an online store. That gives AI A LOT of data. AI can help with content indexing: all content is preloaded with search filters.

If a customer enters a specific search query, the search function suggests relevant terms. This increases the accuracy of the prediction. Content indexing on the website provides a better user experience, so that search bounce rates are reduced and the performance of the online store is improved.

Multilingual Support for Web Applications Through AI

Many web applications today offer automatic translation of their content. Services such as the Microsoft Translator API or tools such as Google Translate handle automatic translation and can be easily integrated into various applications. Source and target languages are automatically recognized, and texts are also translated into other languages.

Exploring Emotions With AI

Although AI cannot feel anything like humans, it can receive data from humans and act on it in response. For example, this innovation includes:

• cursor movement
• eye contact
• time spent on the website
• activity on the website/app
• facial recognition
• session length
• bounce rate

Taken together, these elements can be used as data to analyze responses to various components of a website and its elements. AI categorizes results into subgroups. For example “was the customer happy, angry, annoyed?”, “Did the customer find relevant information”, “What part of the website needs improvement?”

Smart Content

AI can also improve UX with personalized content. It can send a fan of a certain football club to an article that highlights current club events or introduces new club merchandise.

Meanwhile, a mountain biker gets teasers showing the best trails in Bavaria, an oarsman learns something about the best waters for his sport, and a skier learns about an article about skiing. Everyone gets a link to the content that’s most likely to work for them.

What can AI do to do this?

AI can create a data-driven profile of the visitor and, on that basis, make customized content offers to entice them to buy through personalized content.

AI can assess how well the content works and measure which types of content don’t. Content can be represented in a form of text, infographic, video, podcast, or quiz.

AI and Automotive Design Testing

AI-based test automation is also developing very efficiently, especially in the area of web applications. Through the targeted use of neural networks and clustering algorithms, different parts of a website or app are analyzed and then modeled.

Here, neural networks are trained, among other things, to recognize basic website elements such as buttons, text boxes, images, and drop-down lists. Test cases and test scenarios can already be created automatically without human intervention.

Agile software development with ever-increasing release frequency requires anticipation to make software tests as efficient as possible. AI test automation is becoming state-of-the-art. In the future, artificial intelligence will provide enhanced support to make testing processes even easier to maintain.

The results of the test are based on the cognitive model of users. Such a model can simulate the realistic learning behavior of a potential user. This offers another advantage: the use of such a “cognitive crash test” can significantly reduce the cost of “classic” user experience evaluations without any compromise in terms of operational efficiency.

For many companies, conducting manual tests is very time-consuming, and the increase in testing volume due to different browsers, operating systems, and devices makes the task even more challenging. With AI’s comprehensive solution for executing and analyzing automated functional tests, you will benefit from time savings and improved quality.

The End of the Graphical User Interface?

In the past, we did not control computers with the mouse and keyboard but had to know complex commands to be able to interact with machines.

However, it is almost forgotten that the most natural interaction for humans is still their language.

Before booking a flight, it can take 18 steps on 10 different screens where you have to navigate through a lot of input fields, selection boxes, drop-down lists, and buttons. But now we can use artificial intelligence to optimize the customer experience and forget about screens.

Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, natural language can be transformed into structured data based on which the application can perform the desired action.

We no longer have to deal with an abundance of screens with different designs and different menus, buttons, and shortcuts. For example, the user can say: “Transfer $100 to my savings account as soon as possible”.

This interaction capability demonstrates a tremendous cognitive relief for the user.

Wrapping Up

What is certain is that the time of artificial intelligence has indeed come. And just as the Internet was not a “trend” that could come and go quickly, neither is artificial intelligence. All the tech giants have identified AI as a central technology with transformative potential in all areas.

At Google alone, more than 1,000 researchers work solely in this area and are rethinking all of the company’s activities on this basis. Artificial Intelligence will remain and evolve rapidly. And it will not only affect our use of computers or smartphones, but it will also change our daily lives forever.