How will chatbots & AI influence our design decisions?
No-UI, is not a new topic, Techcrunch wrote an article back in 2015 — discussing how messaging has become central to our everyday lives in personal communication. They discuss the possibilities of messaging transforming the way we interact with computers.
When you have conversational interfaces and invisible apps you won’t necessarily need a UI. What if you could communicate with your device or computer using brainwave hardware such as Emotiv Where does that leave visual designers, and how does it inform the decisions made by UX and CX designers.
Visionaries and thought leaders in tech are predicting it will be a year in which chatbots and AI will begin to make their prominent mark.
“Our penchant for making things smarter and smarter will have a profound impact on nearly everything we do”
— Kevin Kelly, Digital Visionary
This quote is from Kevin Kelly’s TED talk ‘How AI can bring on a second Industrial Revolution’(15mins) — he explains how we’re going to see the distribution of AI across the grid — the cloud — in the same way electricity did back in the beginning of Industrial Revolution. What we have electrified, we are going to cognify in the next 20 years. Kevin says, the next 10,000 start-ups will use this formula, ‘(X + AI) = Smart Product’.
We’re starting to see real evidence of consumers requesting AI within the retail sector. In a recent report conducted by Apadmi, 29% of consumers wanted the same level of customer service as in-store, along with 26% of consumers wanting to see retailers adopt artificial intelligence to improve digital shopping experiences. 🤔
That got me thinking, consumers want the same level of customer service in their digital experiences. There is a clear message here that retailers and designers need to listen to.
These findings beg the question; How do we implement and plan for these expectations? How can we essentially stay relevant and best serve people?
Should we look to become developers of AI and backend systems? I wouldn’t suggest going that far…not just yet anyway.
Human intervention will still play a pivotal role as Kevin Kelly explains;
“ The best medical diagnostician is not a doctor, it’s not an AI, it’s the team. We’re going to be working with these AIs, and I think you’ll be paid in the future by how well you work with these bots.”
— Kevin Kelly, Digital Visionary
What we can start to do as design teams is ask questions on how we can work with the likes of chatbots and AI to better enhance peoples’ experiences. Should we be creating experiences that are tailored to the returning consumer as opposed to simply the new?
After all that’s what we’re doing as designers, we’re trying to solve problems and offer solutions to pain points.
Why should their level of customer service with a digital product be any different to how they are treated in-store?
This weeks edition has raised questions into how we design in the future, and how we can stay relevant moving forward. The challenges we face in a rapidly moving industry are ones we need to start confronting with product owners, clients, stakeholders and ourselves.
I challenge you to start thinking about how we use these new technologies. How can we enhance the way we design for future user experiences, that will become ever more personalised and empathetic.
This article first appeared on my weekly newsletter, The Future of UX & UI Design — I never spam or share your email address, that’s a promise.
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