Every business today knows the importance of a solid website design. For web, and more importantly, for mobile. Your website design is your business’s first handshake with potential new customers, it’s your first impression.
A good design can encourage someone to hang around and eventually convert into a customer, or it can prompt someone to jump ship, abandoning your website and business as quickly as they found it.
Website design is now going beyond content structure, UX/UI design practices, and content types. More and more businesses are starting to implement artificial intelligence (AI) into their website design, to provide a more interactive, streamlined, and customer-centric browsing experience.
In this article, we’ll explore the four types of AI you can start to implement into your website design and benefit from today.
AI Design Strategies to Implement in Your Website
Over 70% of web designers believe that non-responsive design is a top reason that someone leaves a website. AI is a fantastic way to help you build a website design that responds to your customer’s needs and keeps them happy and engaged throughout their browse.
A scary number to keep at the forefront of your web design workflow is that over 40% of people will leave a website because of poor functionality. That’s cutting off nearly half of your website visitors due to giving them poor navigation and UX.
These AI design strategies will help you fight these numbers, and keep users where you need them.
1. AI Text to Speech Voiceovers for Video Content
First up on our list is AI text to speech. Many businesses are looking to make more out of their content, however, this can often prove pretty costly.
At the same time, businesses are continuously upping their SEO strategies and a large part of this is optimizing older content to give it a breath of fresh air while ensuring it’s better targeted toward their ideal customer personas (ICPs).
AI text to speech is enabling businesses to make the most of their old blog content and give entirely new markets access to their written articles via podcasts. Podcast listeners are predicted to account for over 20% of all internet users worldwide in 2022—that’s over 424 million people! It’s safe to say there’s a massive market on the table for your brand, and AI text-to-speech technology can help you get there quicker.
At the same time, businesses are using AI technology to transform videos with voiceovers in one language, into videos with voiceovers catering to every language of their demographic. This eliminates the chore of having to find, test, and recruit multiple different actors across various languages, and gives you every language you need under one roof; saving time and money for your marketing team. In this context, choosing unicast vs multicast delivery methods becomes crucial for ensuring seamless and personalized content distribution
What’s more, AI voiceovers learn as they go. You can correct them in a certain way to pronounce something and they’ll never make the same mistake again. At the same time, they’re a lot cheaper than hiring human voiceover artists, and there’s no limit to the amount of time you’re using when working with a machine!
This is definitely AI technology to consider if you’re looking to give your video or older blog content a competitive edge and help it to stand out from the crowd. It’s also a great option if you’re building a website design on a budget.
2. Visual and Voice Search
We’re not all wordsmiths, and with so many products now being discovered on social feeds that come and go as quickly as the English sunshine, customers are seeing products they love and they are never able to find them again.
We can say goodbye to these problems as more businesses are starting to introduce visual and voice search to their websites, especially in ecommerce. This means that consumers no longer need to know what they’re looking for, but can search websites using a screenshot of something they’ve seen online, or a photo they took of something they spotted on their journey.
In fact, over 60% of Gen-Z and Millennials wanted to see more visual search capabilities when they shop online. Visual and voice search technologies are not only improving the shopping experience but are also finding applications in other areas, such as renting designer bags. Users can simply upload an image of a bag they’ve seen or describe it via voice search to find matching rental options, enhancing their convenience and satisfaction.
What’s more, enabling on-site voice searches answers two big demands.
The first, is voice search through popular AI assistants like Siri and Alexa. When businesses design websites that answer queries based on how someone would voice search for them over text search for them, it will see their website more discoverable for voice searchers out there.
Secondly, businesses make their website design more accessible for those who are encountering difficulties with text searches. For example, people with sight difficulties. By enabling AI voice search, businesses become that much more diverse and can cater to a larger audience.
3. Product Discovery Tools
Product discoverability is all about ensuring your products are easy to find. By using a combination of AI vision, machine learning, and SEO—product discoverability improves the user experience and accelerates revenue growth by ensuring user searches always return product matches.
It enriches your product metadata to ensure your product tags are accurate and extensive—making your site more searchable.
Product discovery tools use optimized product tags to provide relevant recommendations to users on your website. There are ample uses for product discovery—let’s take a look at how it could improve the user experience on your website.
Let’s consider an example to explain how AI-powered product discovery can be used in your website design. Imagine you sell clothing, and your user is on your website in search of a denim jacket that’s just blue enough—not too jaded, but not too blue. Keep this example in mind—we’ll use it throughout this section.
The first way product discovery tools can improve the user experience is by recommending similar products to the ones your users are browsing. Users don’t want any old denim jacket recommendation—they want recommendations that are similar in color, style, cut, and more. AI vision quickly identifies your most similar products and includes them in your product suggestions.
Product discovery can also identify and display coordinating items. Using our example, this could be a pair of sunglasses or a handbag that compliments the denim jacket. By presenting coordinating products at this stage of the user journey, you’re more likely to increase the users’ total purchase amount—up to an 8% increase in revenue per session.
Finally, product discovery can help your users quickly find other items in the product image. So, in our example, this would be the top, shoes, eyewear, and accessories worn by the model alongside the denim jacket. Product discovery tools identify those additional products and make it easy for the user to find them.
Implementing product discovery tools on your website is a sure-fire way to improve your website user experience, whilst also boosting sales and revenue—a win-win.
4. AI Chatbots
Last on our list is AI chatbots. Chatbots have come a long way since their first rise. They’re now so much smarter than they used to be, can pick up on keywords and phrases, and—depending on consumer requests—can recommend a journey to send people on.
What’s more, chatbots can learn from their experiences with customers, when they find that one of their suggestions has been helpful, they’ll know that their interaction was a success and follow the same path in the future.
Chatbots are a fantastic tool for automating user-triggered flows, whether that be a content nurture journey or immediately redirecting a consumer to the sales department.
What’s the Future of AI in Web Design?
The future of AI in web design is rife. As our tech gets smarter and smarter, so do our processes and our outcomes. We’ll start to see artificial intelligence weave its way into our website design to provide smoother, more engaging, and personalized experiences for potential customers.
Remember, if you are going to implement any of these AI strategies into your website, do so with care, and take one step at a time. AI takes time to implement and it’s better off doing it correctly and slowly the first time around than rushing things through and having to re-do mistakes that could have been avoided upfront.
If you’re looking thin on the ground for resources to help you do this correctly, don’t be afraid to contract someone to help you get the job done. Your output in costs will be well worth what you’ll save in time and renditions.
Will you be implementing any of these AI strategies into your website design? Let us know.
