AI & Web Design: What You Should Know

Thinking about or didn’t know you can use AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning to design your website? Both can design powerful, customer-facing tools that make your website a better experience, but they come with limitations. We cover the advantages and disadvantages of AI plugins and machine learning for your business’ website.

The Versatility of AI and Web Design

Today, we’re only encountering AI more and more. You have probably interacted with a chatbot, had predicative text perfectly finish your sentence, or seen your phone’s map learn your regular commute. If you read the news or use social media, you have seen only increasing references to AI, whether it is generating art or concerns that AI has achieved Skynet levels of sentience.

For websites, numerous AI plugins and add-ons increase functionality, with some already built into many website hosting services. Some of these can immediately recognize and delete spam comments, automatically find connections and link blog articles, improve SEO, or check grammar and readability. 

Useful AI and Machine Learning Plugins/Add-ons

Some AI and machine learning plugins can also help you engage with your customers and website visitors:

• Chatbots – AI-driven bots that your customers can chat with to get answers to their questions
• Virtual Assistants – like a chatbot, customers can interact with an AI assistant to help them make purchase decisions, redirect them to relevant pages, or connect them to customer service
• Content Curation – these AI learn from the content visitors to your site read, watch, and engage with to recommend other content that matches their interests
• Product Recommendation – these plugins learn from a customer’s purchases, wishlist, page visits, and abandoned carts to provide recommendations for products while shopping on the website and in their emails
• Website Translators – these AI provide visitors to your site the ability to automatically translate the entire page or any text content into any supported language

All of these can give your users a better and more functional user experience.

Advantages of AI and Web Design

AI and machine learning website plugins increase your site’s functionality. They also can provide your visitors or customers with a more personalized experience. Content curation and product recommendations encourage visitors and customers to stay on your site longer. They find pages that interest them more easily and become more familiar with your content, services, or products. Immediate answers from chatbots or virtual assistants provide users with a fluid and convenient experience.

That personalized experience comes without an extra cost of human hours. Through these AI, users receive support, help, and recommendations without taking an employee’s time. Plugins can cost money to add to your website, but they are often cheaper than dedicating your employees to answering simple questions or providing recommendations. It is also impossible for your employees to look at the history of every single customer or visitor to provide recommendations. It would take hours for a human, when an AI can do it instantly. Instead, these AI allow you to dedicate your team to more urgent or complicated customer service matters.

By providing machine translations, you can make your website more accessible, widen your reach, and increase your audience and community. While English is one of the most widely used languages in the world, most prefer and have greater proficiency reading in their native language. Providing machine translation allows them to use your website more easily and create a stronger personal connection to your brand. 

Disadvantages of AI and Web Design

These AI plugins help reduce human workload while still providing your customers with a more personalized experience. However, while it is making fast paces in tech, AI does not replace a human’s touch, at least for now. Chatbots and email automations are limited to the information they can provide, and usually cannot process more complex tasks like returns or customer requests that involve account sensitive information or making decisions about policies. Some customers and users may become frustrated when they cannot communicate their issue with a human easily. Make sure it is easy for users to switch from the bot and get in touch with a person.

Similarly, recommendation engines and content curators rely on the amount of information they access about products/content and the users. Another limitation is how well their programming can interpret that information to make suggestions. Make sure enough metadata or tags are provided for products or content that the AI can identify recommendations. They will also take time to learn a customer’s or user’s interests and might also overestimate an accidental page visit. This can have users’ receiving recommendations for products or content that they are not interested in. The best AI curators will provide easy, direct recommendations while they learn a customer’s interests to provide more personalized ones.

Automatic translation can potentially frustrate users. They have become faster and more precise in recent years, but still make mistakes. They primarily translate text, not images, and often stumble on idiom or misunderstand a word’s use in a specific context. Machine translation can be useful to quickly generate a mostly understandable translation and put the literal meaning into another language, but proper translation takes the human skill of conceptualizing. Furthermore, AI cannot localize, adapting content from one culture’s language to another to give a translation the proper sense. Advise users your website’s translations are machine generated to temper their expectations. If enough visitors are using that language, then you may want to consider hiring a translator.

Overall, AI can help provide a personalized experience if it works well; however, when it fails, it risks exposing the man, or machine, behind the curtain. This creates a disconnect from the human element at your company, can reduce authenticity, and make your customers feel less connected to your brand.

Getting Started

AI and machine learning can quickly and easily improve your website. Interested or have more questions? Rosewood’s web design team can help you determine if and which will best suit your business’ needs.