• Can AI Solve Your UX Design Problems?
  • By Mukund Krishna
  • The Nuggets translation Project
  • Permanent link to this article: github.com/xitu/gold-m…
  • Translator: Changkun Ou
  • Proofreader: Tina92, shawnchenxmu

Can AI solve your UX design problems?

AI Powered UX

One of Mark Zuckerberg’s big New Year’s resolutions for 2016 was to build his own “simple AI robot” to help him out around the house. Remember Jarvis, iron Man’s butler? This is a classic Hollywood example of how AI works.

So what exactly is artificial intelligence (AI)? How does it solve today’s most common UX problems

Tony Stark using Jarvis


Artificial intelligence, or AI, is an advanced humanoid computer system that intelligently manages activities and systems that would normally require humans to perform manually. While robots like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Echo are still handling our most mundane tasks, robots like Google’s Deep Dream are inherently creative and help users solve problems to improve their experience.

AI is being used in multiple real-time scenarios:

  • Dealing with the data explosion: With the advent of smartphones and mobile devices, data is exploding. As the volume of data grows, there is an AI system to analyze, process, organize, and interpret the data.
  • Discern our intentions: Netflix can predict from your behavior what TV shows or movies will keep you on the couch. Imagine your AI system adjusting the temperature of your car and automatically turning off the lights when you get out of the garage.
  • Improved customer experience: AI can help you focus on the right data by digging into details that your human eye might miss. For example, RightClick. IO is a chatbot that lets you create websites by talking to it. Even if you try to deflect it with an unrelated question, the AI device will steer you back to the actual work of creating the site.
RightClick.io


Ai is changing the way we create user experiences. While the Terminator movies give us a dystopian idea of AI, the reality is quite different. AI is a powerful technology that can positively influence consumer behavior and enable businesses to deliver great user experiences.

Understand AI’s role in UX

First, let’s take a look at some real-world scenarios in which AI affects UX today. Context-aware chatbots can delight your customers by providing timely advice or solutions. Navigation apps can guide you effortlessly to your destination. With a few simple clicks, you can have your favorite meal delivered to your doorstep.

How does this work?

The idea to develop AI comes from science fiction, which describes machines that can talk, think or feel. AI is a combination of emerging technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, chatbots, augmented reality, virtual reality and robotics.

AI covers anything that infuses intelligence into machines or devices, enabling them to mimic humans’ unique reasoning abilities. All of this can be done using algorithms that can detect patterns of human behaviour and generate insights from data received and stored on devices. Artificial intelligence-enabled devices or machines should be carefully programmed so that they can help with future decisions.

All of this may sound simple, but these interactions are enabled by rapidly growing AI technologies. In fact, AI will become an indispensable tool in UX designer suites when it comes to humanizing customer experiences. However, in addition to building human-like conversations and actions, AI can also be useful in the digital realm to create great UX.

1. A platform for assistance

AI is going mainstream with robots, which nurture human-like interactions through the power of cognitive intelligence. However, robots cannot completely replace human beings. On the contrary, AI has been instrumental in assisting UX.

For example, TheGrid. IO is an algorithm-driven design platform that lets you build highly impressive and optimized websites. The platform is built around the concept of continuous A/B testing and refined layout. Designers can sift through the multiple options offered by these AI-driven tools and choose the features that fit them.

TheGrid.io

Like any good assistant, it usually makes the best decision among the new options offered, rather than the key decision. When designers have an intelligent platform to help them select a template and validate the template by applying algorithms, it can help them make more creative decisions.

2. Make the journey with AI

Companies like ReFUEL4 harness the power of predictive analytics to understand users’ online behavior and refine it further based on their behavior. The most powerful UX is one that understands and even predicts user interests and actions.

Refuel4

Once the designer can map out the user’s path, he can understand the expected path of the user during the interaction. Ai-driven scheduling allows you to create simple, engaging, and profitable user interfaces.

3. Take over repetitive, low-value creative tasks

In the multi-device world, designers often have to come up with many graphics and a wide variety of content to satisfy various forms of activity. It can be cumbersome and take a lot of time.

Netflix layout generation.


That’s why platforms like Netflix leave these tedious tasks to algorithms. A human designer can draw “rules” for how the layout should work and then provide the system with a library of raw graphic elements to process them. Netflix’s system is able to combine rules with image footage to create original movie posters and banner units.

As the AI handles these tasks, designers can focus more on understanding the user’s journey and refining these rules. It’s no different than a senior designer coaching a team of junior designers, win-win.

AI technologies like machine learning can enable digital marketers to target at a fine-grained level. IBM’s Watson, for example, promotes psychological user segmentation, enabling marketers to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time.

How Watson AI works:

To find statistically relevant phrases, Watson broke the questions down into different keywords or “sentence fragments.” It not only creates a new algorithm for this operation, but also executes hundreds of analysis algorithms simultaneously.

If more algorithms independently produce the same answer, then Watson is more likely to be correct. Once Watson has multiple solutions, it verifies the database’s potential solutions to determine if any of them make sense.

How would you shape AI for better UX?

AI systems can quickly analyze large amounts of data and learn and adjust their behavior in real time. AI systems can infer from context, and you need to provide them with additional information about business rules, questions, metadata, and the like.

As you build a good user experience through each design phase, you can refine the questions you ask the AI system. This will change the way data is analysed.

For example, if you are managing a health insurance website, ask the following questions:

  • How many people between the ages of 40 and 60 use your app?
  • How many mothers-to-be access the system?

The system receives your questions, analyzes the data and learns to give the best answers. Every time you provide new data or standards, the system uses ARTIFICIAL intelligence to improve its own user experience.

The Art of shaping AI:

  • You can ask your AI system questions ranging from general to specific. The system processes the problem, gets the data and learns from itself.
  • AI can analyze all queries on search engines, gather more user analysis results, identify trends, and produce richer results.
  • Use data to optimize the quality of search results: AI can predict search criteria, make suggestions, and make cross-topic recommendations (similar to what Amazon offers) to give you more relevant content.
  • Most importantly, the AI learns all the users that have visited your app so far and provides them with the content they need. This results in a richer user experience.
  • Information architecture with AI: AI analyzes your internal and external data and helps you build the information structure of your content management system and the navigation structure of your end users.

User experience is not necessarily about leveraging insights into data, it’s also about intelligence. Artificial intelligence connects various independent nodes by injecting intelligence into different data sources.

While AI technologies for systems like machine learning, chatbots, VR, robotics, AR and others are growing, the growth seems to be incremental. The combination of AI and UX is the hallmark of future technology. Merging AI with UX is a formula that will lead us to make our content more searchable and accessible.

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