The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) is touted to improve many areas of business, and experience design is no exception. Cees de Gooijer, UX and Product Principal at AND Digital, outlines how AI can take the field to new heights.
Whether we like it or not, AI is changing the way we deliver experiences to our customers. From data-driven decision-making to early design validation, AI helps us bring products to market faster and, most importantly, with the right features.
Other key use cases include improving accessibility, early validation of user needs, and providing hyper-personalized interfaces.
Providing a personalized experience
Expectations for personalized experiences have skyrocketed given the hyper-personalized devices we carry in our pockets every day. AI and machine learning can accelerate the creation of these experiences by analyzing massive amounts of browsing behavior, purchase history, and demographic data.
The platform can also deliver these experiences in real time by predicting user preferences and behavior based on interaction and contextual data, enabling the generation of tailored experiences and personalized content that dynamically adapts to users' changing needs and preferences.
Netflix and Amazon are great examples of using your browsing and purchase history to provide personalized movie recommendations and product suggestions, but personalization is also growing in other industries, such as finance (personalized investment advice and financial planning) and healthcare (personalized treatment plans and preventive care recommendations).
The opportunities for AI-powered personalization are only growing, but don't get caught up in the hype and sacrifice security and ethics, which are more business critical than ever. Prioritize customer consent, transparent data collection, and robust security measures first, and you'll be able to deliver customized, loyalty-building experiences.
Improving accessibility with generative UI
The industry still has a lot to do when it comes to accessibility, which should be at the core of every digital service but is often an afterthought. With the help of AI, accessibility can be made a priority. AI-powered assistive technologies, such as text-to-speech and context-aware suggestions, can help users with literacy, motor and cognitive impairments, helping them get more out of their digital interactions.
AI can also be used to generate a personalized user interface for each user, optimizing it for the unique needs of each specific user. Not only that, but AI can continuously analyze how users interact with your product to continuously improve your accessibility measures. The generated UI can also ensure that the experience adapts as users become more familiar with the system. For example, novices can see a simplified interface, while experienced users can see advanced features.
Test ideas early with synthetic users
The earlier you user test your ideas, the better. It gives you more time to validate truly successful ideas, and ultimately helps you get your product to market faster (and cheaper). AI can help augment this process by building simulations of predefined personas to test your ideas against. Synthetic users can be surprisingly effective at filtering out bad ideas from a sea of ideas, especially in early iterations.
But like any practice that involves users and their experiences, AI is no substitute for the real thing. Eliminate bad ideas early on, then validate, test, and refine your product development with real users. Relying solely on AI without feedback from real users is like sailing blind.
Automating real-time analytics
Custom GPT is revolutionizing market research and competitive analysis. By using clearly defined prompts and predefined sources such as competitor websites, industry reports, social media, news articles, etc., you can automate large parts of the analysis process.
GPT Sitemap Tool makes it easy to scrape data from any website, so you can update it weekly, monthly or as regularly as needed, and we provide examples of the output you want to ensure you get exactly what you're looking for. This automation frees up your time for strategic tasks and keeps you informed in near real-time about the latest trends and competitor activity.
Automate tedious tasks
While there are plenty of opportunities to use AI to enrich behind-the-scenes processes, we also offer AI-powered solutions that improve our clients’ experience (and the experience of their clients).
A recent example is Dutch legal aid company ARAG, which developed an AI case-handling interface that can evaluate large volumes of documents – from contracts and emails to phone records and WhatsApp conversations – to extract relevant facts and summarise key information, enabling lawyers to spend more time on the strategic and tactical aspects of cases and less time on tedious tasks.
While there is understandable resistance to AI and its role, opportunities like this can truly bring good to our world, ultimately making quality legal help more accessible and affordable for those who need it.
What does the future hold for AI in experience design?
While we have made rapid progress, there is still significant room for improvement in the field of UX. These opportunities are more likely to come from multi-AI agent settings rather than from new models. We know that value in UX comes from understanding the entire user journey and holistically supporting the user along the way.
But today, AI is added to the journey to address small needs individually, rather than creating a comprehensive end-to-end experience. By employing multiple AI agents for different tasks and allowing them to interact with each other and with the user, we can create a more dynamic, “human-like” experience. This approach will be a game-changer in the coming years.
Looking at the bigger picture, there will always be resistance and “purists” in any field, but there is no escaping the fact that the future will be AI-driven. This doesn't mean we're going to “robotize” the world. Authentic human experience will always be important. But even if your company doesn't adapt to AI, other companies will. And in doing so, other companies will become more efficient and effective.
The opportunity to better connect with consumers through AI-powered personalization and optimize customer support with predictive, adaptive user interfaces is here, and those that seize it will be the ones that succeed.
