For what the future seems to unfold, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology without alternative. Today’s modern industry verticals are crucially reliant on faster, accurate and more affordable modes of online business. With its unlimited potential, designers and developers can immensely leverage AI applications in web development to streamline their daily website management tasks and achieve a higher response value from their target user. AI applications and tools not only make your website operations intuitively clear but turn its online experience more rich and personalized.
According to experts, AI will grow into a $118.6 billion industry by 2025
In theory, AI can empower you to enhance your website’s appearance, strengthen its search abilities, manage and organize your inventory better, improve interaction with visitors, provide personalized user experience, and accurately target consumers through your digital marketing campaigns. With a growing number of designers and developers shifting towards AI-based design practices, artificial intelligence has now become an indispensable part of modern web development.
In this article we will take you through the knowledge sets and the amazing applications AI is offering to improve the usability and user experience of your website.
The Rise of Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) Systems
The growing field of artificial design intelligence (ADI) systems has influenced a major shift in the way websites are designed today. In a traditional environment, the user interface design process is often overwhelming since you require a great deal of creativity to keep it unique. It may begin with you and your team of designers sharing their ideas, jotting them down on a whiteboard, and exploring several possibilities and outcomes. Before any A/B testing can begin, the wireframe is set out and translated into HTML so the development process can begin. The process as we all know demands a sheer amount of effort and errors are just something you cannot avoid.
With recent leaps in technology, AI has quickly mainstreamed into the online landscape, allowing designers to combine its applications into websites and create better functionality and user experience. The Grid was one of the earliest examples of AI and Web Design hand in hand together. It was a design software running on AI that helps web designers and website owners to get modern-looking, customized websites based on their specific project needs, business activity, or personal preferences. Since then, there have been several other successful entrants that have taken AI and Web design to a whole new level. AI innovators such as Adobe, Firedrop, Bookmark, Squarespace, Wix, Tailor Brands are the leading tech companies to use AI in design for online environments.
AI can now transform handwritten user interface design right from something as simple as a picture to a valid HTML markup code that maintains itself. Here, the AI can routinely control the overall content of your web design, from visual elements and typography to animations and other graphical information.
This comes particularly useful when design decisions are required for specific types of websites. For example, if you have an e-commerce website that receives a plethora of Request for Quotes (RFQs), you can optimize it with AI-based on its everyday interactions with customers. Since most website owners require new designs to supplement their product launches or upcoming events, an AI working in the background works as a perfect solution to stay updated and remain competitive in the market. The AI operates by collecting information on the website analytics, its user base, product catalog, and other key aspects. Once the data is complete, the AI will take the final instructions from you such as theme, content, and color preferences to create an entirely unique design for your website.
According to a recent survey, 61% of business professionals claim machine learning and AI turned out to be their organization’s most significant data initiative
Moreover, AI is not just about replicating intelligence, but a significant part of its construct is to perform its functions as humanly as possible. For example, a self-driving car programmed by an AI is not just obeying traffic rules, but it is also learning to exhibit signs of human intelligence when coming into contact with another driver. Similarly, an AI-based chatbot interacting with a human user will not just be able to produce replies, but answer them in as human a way as possible so as to create unique answers for each query.
AI for Improving UX
AI now commands several key aspects of web design and holds a deciding role in UX. With AI’s latest interventions in web design, designers are able to transform their online front into a more meaningful and rich experience for the customer. AI has enabled designers to create interfaces that are far more engaging, responsive, and ultimately more human. Among many of AI’s achievements we see today, its most evident role is in myriad AI tools. AI has effectively changed the face of modern web design and quickly established many standard parts of human-machine interaction. One of its biggest examples is the entry of chatbots that are now the fixture of almost every website or mobile application. With advanced AI algorithms and complex machine learning procedures, AI is effectively bridging the gap between human cognition and machine automation.
AI-powered chatbots will help online businesses save $8 billion worth in business costs by 2022.
This has changed the fabric of traditional web design and rendered a powerful impact on the way users interact with websites. Moreover, AI-based applications have redefined what it means to communicate, producing human-like answers, replacing the need for pre-programmed conversational pathways. Today’s chatbots are based on advanced natural language processing (NLP) systems that able to generate meaningful conversations that have far better results in generating engagement. Here are some interesting statistics how chatbots will lead the online businesses in the future.
Advanced AI chatbots such as the Watson Assistant can understand the business’s historical chat logs and calls and develop its own knowledge base. Moreover, it can request customers for more clarity, ask customers for human assistance, provide recommendation for conversation styles, and run your website messaging channels, mobile app and service tools independently.
Expanding beyond text-based interactions, the next frontier in AI’s influence on web design includes AI text to video capabilities. This technology can synthesize text content into dynamic video presentations, making web experiences more immersive and accessible. The AI-driven ‘text to video’ tools allow for the automatic creation of engaging video content from written material, simplifying the process for designers who aim to cater to a diverse and visually-oriented audience.
- Among the top industries benefiting from AI chatbots is Real Estate recording usage of 28%, followed by Travel at 16% and Education at 14%
- According to Gatner report, 85% of customers interactions by 2020 will be handled by AI chatbots
- By 2023, a total of 2.3 billion hours of business and consumers will be saved though chatbots
- According to a report by Global Market Insights, the overall market size of chatbots will reach $1.3 billion by 2024
AI for Enhancing UI
Similarly, User Interfaces (UIs) are optimized through deep learning and adaptive AI, that are capable of taking design decisions entirely on their own. It works by training the program to understand design principles, and allowing it to observe existing pages of your website. Combining the two processes, the AI is able to mimic independent thoughts and produce functional and attractive web designs exclusive of human expertise. Web development platforms such as Wix actively use ADI to manage the design of its UI.
Wix ADI algorithm works by selecting from billions of combinations to design and build a unique design interface, completely exclusive to the user. And since the ADI is trained for the platform, it keeps learning and customizing the site based on user needs, business activity, customer interactions, and personal preferences. This has allowed Wix to gain predictive reporting about its design program, get faster time to value, minimize costs, and achieve much greater merchant-customer relationship. LinkedIn also went through an extensive revamp to improve its networking and navigation features to provide users with a better browsing experience. It now uses AI to produce job recommendations, connection suggestions, and how profiles should be optimized.
AI Recommendation and Optimization Tools
There are numerous AI-based product recommendation solutions that use social proof to influence purchase decisions. These tools provide recommendations as soon as customers interact with the website and provide valuable insight based on their searches. Extensions and plugins can track customer store history and generate recommendations based on related searches. Netflix, the leading online media-services provider also uses AI to manage its recommendations by showing results based on the user’s preferences and selections made by similar profiled customers. 80% of Netflix streaming is done as a result of AI recommendations.
Companies such as Adobe have already begun to take AI into their product architecture. In 2016 Adobe launched Sensei, an AI-based framework built to improve the designing abilities of the platform using intelligent features to help designers work their tasks more efficiently. Sensei also uses machine learning to enhance the overall design and delivery of the project, dramatically improving the final product. Using AI, and machine learning, Adobe Sensei can help you uncover the hidden opportunities in design, enhance tedious processes, and deliver relevant experiences for each user.
AI as a Web Design Diagnostic Tool
Although AI is generally deployed for improving the functionality and user experience of web design, it also works as a precision diagnostic tool. With the new era of modern web design, rapidly changing trends, and stricter standards of search engines such as Google, the quality of your web design has become a key determinant in the ultimate success of your digital footprint. But while you may be able to achieve a high quality of design, you must also ensure it remains maintained by periodically running tests. However, due to the constant repetition of these tests, the source code gets modified which adds further load into the process. These tests are not only time consuming but often take a heavy toll on your website performance.
AI-powered analytics tools can enable you to assess the quality of your designs, observe how they perform in real-time, and gain real insights on how to refine them. With AI tools for data analysts, you can now effectively eliminate the need for A/B testing and get better site design results. Since design software has become increasingly complex, the final product often comes with its fair share of challenges. Here, AI tools and applications can be used to develop and test different types of information, validate their authenticity, and examine the scope of their potential without any human input. If you train the AI right, it can eliminate tons of procedures you otherwise would have to get involved in when creating, diagnosing or editing a design. AI-based Testers such as Applitools can be used to test the visual code of the website, track the web page behavior, and enhance the aesthetics of the page.
Final Takeaway
73% of global consumers are open to the use of AI by businesses provided they make life easier
With current statistics and the latest technological breakthroughs, AI’s imperative role in web design and development is virtually certain. Growing automation needs, advanced computing resources, and an increasing number of AI specialties have set off an exponential increase in the amount of AI we can implement. While technology may still be in its infancy, the immeasurable potential of AI to understand creative rules and use them independently in a multitude of design dynamics will soon eclipse traditional methods of web design. In the future, AI will soon offer websites that use adaptive intelligence to provide personalized user experience instead of a one-size-fits-all methodology. This will also be the tipping point for the human fed-databases as artificial intelligence will take life on its own that surpasses the performance of human cognition.
Want to learn more?
If you’d like to become an expert in UX Design, Design Thinking, UI Design, or another related design topic, then consider taking an online UX course from the Interaction Design Foundation. For example, Design Thinking, Become a UX Designer from Scratch, Conducting Usability Testing or User Research – Methods and Best Practices. Good luck on your learning journey!
