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How Artificial Intelligence Is Impacting UX Design

April 19, 2021

Today, every business sector and industry is incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) to automate processes, improve efficiency, and reduce costs, including the industry of digital transformation, which is using artificial intelligence specifically to improve the user experience.

In this article, I’ll discuss some impacts of artificial intelligence on user experiences, what UX processes artificial intelligence can make more efficient, how artificial intelligence can help UX designers, and how artificial intelligence might affect UX design jobs in the future.

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Impacts of Artificial Intelligence on User Experiences

In some respects, artificial intelligence, or machine learning (ML), and UX designers have similar functions. They both gather data, analyze users’ interactions, and can predict human behavior. Chatbots, self-driving cars, delivery drones, Google Translate, Alexa, and Siri are all perfect examples of artificial intelligence using historical data to deliver enhanced services. Advancements in artificial intelligence and machine-learning technology have made the development of enhanced user experiences possible. Let’s look at some of the impacts of artificial intelligence on product user experiences.

Thinner User Interfaces

Thinner user interfaces present fewer hindrances to users when they are navigating or exploring a Web site or application. Using historical data, artificial intelligence can anticipate a user’s action or query and provide a possible solution or pertinent results. The development of AI technology has enabled products to better prioritize the queries of users.

Automation

While many repetitive, mundane tasks aren’t important, they require human attention for their successful completion. Some examples of such tasks that artificial intelligence can automate include resizing images, making color corrections, and cropping images.

AI developers have come up with intelligent technology solutions that can do all of these tasks without any human intervention—for example, Adobe’s stitch capability can identify patterns in images and help designers stitch them together.

Smarter, More Modular Design Systems

A design system provides patterns, modules, and elements that together comprehend the design language of a product or brand. Salesforce, GE, Airbnb, Google, and many other companies have created design systems that UX designers can use to provide a consistent, well-designed user interface to their customers or users.

Integrating artificial intelligence, or machine learning, into these systems makes it possible to gather and analyze metrics that help product teams to understand how each individual user interacts with the elements of a user interface. The better a design system can understand what’s working and what’s not, the more it can optimize its modules to deliver better UX outcomes.

Visual Effects

One innovation from AI developers has resulted in the development of many applications that use AI technology for human-face recognition, including Autodraw, Artisto, and Prisma. Plus, users can apply visual effects such as blur and shadow to images of human faces.

Personalization

Another AI-driven capability that has had considerable impact on enhancing the user experience is personalization. Personalized user experiences can deliver greater efficiencies to users and enhance the user experience.

Powering UX Processes Through Artificial Intelligence

The primary reason for using artificial intelligence is reducing the need for human attention. In the field of UX design, artificial intelligence, or machine learning, can now power UX processes ranging from the analysis of data to creating design deliverables. Thus, UX designers can use artificial intelligence to both improve the UX design process and enhance the user experience.

Data Analysis

Artificial intelligence can analyze large amounts of data to ascertain patterns and deliver meaningful UX research results. For example, an artificial intelligence could generate questionnaires to collect data from users, then use that data for qualitative data analysis. (Artificial intelligence can also provide relevant responses to users who need to carry out qualitative data analyses.)

UX Design

Even though UX design is a creative stage of the product-development process, artificial intelligence can play a major role in design. You can leverage various algorithms that are based on historical patterns in user data to create flow diagrams.

Wireframing

Even with very little data, artificial intelligence can develop wireframes from a flowchart. Once an artificial intelligence understands the context and the flow, it can easily generate complete wireframes for an entire application. The UX designer need only customize or edit the wireframes to meet specific product requirements.

A/B Testing

Artificial intelligence can generate multiple variants of a UX design solution in preparation for A/B or multivariate testing, then determine which solution performs best.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Help UX Designers

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been helping developers and designers leverage automation in their product- and application-development projects for a long time. Let’s consider how.

Making Decisions

Artificial intelligence can provide choices to UX designers and help them quickly make design decisions. ML predictions are based on historical datasets and, by giving users the fewest potential choices, make their decision-making process easy and fast.

Building Bonds Between Humans and Artificial Intelligences

Voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa are perfect examples of Human-AI bonding. After obtaining and analyzing large amounts of data from users, an artificial intelligence can reliably predict human behavior, which helps the development of Human-AI bonding. UX designers can leverage Human-AI bonding to improve the user experience, throughout the application-development process.

Analyzing Data Efficiently

UX designers design user interfaces—to a certain extent—on the basis of data analysis. If you gave the same task to an artificial intelligence, it could analyze huge amounts of data, then generate useful results. Any user experience would be better if it were designed after analyzing oceans of data. Artificial intelligence can do this analysis for you in no time. Imagine how relevant the products you design and develop after analyzing large amounts of user data would be to your users.

Delivering Value to Users

An AI-powered app focuses on satisfying the precise needs of users. Developers can program an artificial intelligence to deliver the best user experience and great outcomes. A product that delivers maximal value to your customers and users results in a profitable business.

Could Artificial Intelligences Take over UX Design Jobs?

The purpose of artificial intelligence is to assist people with their tasks, enhancing their productivity and efficiency. Artificial intelligence can help UX designers create personalized user experiences that satisfy individual users’ needs. Plus, artificial intelligence can save UX designers time and effort by assisting them in designing and managing customer services.

Artificial intelligence is still in its learning stage of development. While it can learn from human experiences, it does not yet have the ability to think. An artificial intelligence would be inefficient in trying to solve complex design issues that UX designers can easily solve. Therefore, artificial intelligence won’t replace UX designers. But the ever-evolving development of AI capabilities suggests that their role may be different in the future.

UX designers currently accept the help of artificial intelligence in completing their mundane and repetitive tasks. But when artificial intelligence becomes capable of more complex work, UX designers could receive the help of artificial intelligence in building complex architectures and generating perfect code.

A time could even come when ML technologies would be so highly developed that all a UX designer has left to do would be highly creative work. But, for now, all of this lies in the future.

No matter how much AI development evolves, even though artificial intelligence can learn from experience, it cannot achieve the independent, innovative, creative-thinking ability that only a human mind possesses. Therefore, in the foreseeable future, there isn’t any threat of artificial intelligence replacing the UX designer’s job.

What Does Artificial Intelligence Hold for the Future of UX Design?

Artificial intelligence has a bright future. Unlocking the full potential of artificial intelligence could present limitless opportunities for the businesses that leverage artificial intelligence to enhance both the product user experience and the UX design process. Artificial intelligence could help UX designers to achieve the dream of moving away from designing generic products for an entire customer base to customizing or personalizing the user experience for each customer or user. One possible goal for the future is innovating screenless products that provide users with secure, dematerialized products.

Conclusion

My goal in writing this article was to shed some light on the positive impacts of artificial intelligence on UX design and the user experience. The combination of artificial intelligence and UX design holds tremendous promise for the future. Therefore, it is the responsibility of both businesses and product developers to make optimal use of AI technologies that can increase the capabilities of products. What do you think? Could artificial intelligence dominate the future of UX design? 

Business Analyst at eTatvasoft.com

Dallas, Texas, USA

Stephanie DonaholeStephanie is a core member of the business-analysis team at eTatvasoft. She enjoys writing and sharing her knowledge.  Read More

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