How AI can boost user experience

Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows machines or, more commonly, software, to carry out tasks that usually require human intelligence. It may sound sinister, but the truth is very different. In fact, many people are already quite happy to interact with AI systems on a regular basis.

For example, Amazon’s Alexa personal assistant and Google Translate are both examples of artificial intelligence systems. They work by processing historical data to do something which would normally require a human with particular skills: research skills in the case of Alexa, and language skills for Google Translate.

How can AI help your charity?

Alexa and Google Translate are hugely powerful AI systems, but many AI products that your charity could benefit from are far less high-tech. Often they are designed to do a single task that humans find repetitive, inconvenient, or time consuming.

Digital interactions

Charities increasingly interact with their constituents digitally, particularly through websites or mobile apps. Many charities use AI in the form of chatbots to provide information to constituents at any time of the day or night.

A chatbot uses a form of AI called natural language processing to establish what information the constituent is after, and then processes the data it has at its disposal to provide an answer – such as the opening hours of a charity shop.

But AI can be used in more fundamental ways to help your charity boost the user experience of constituents who interact with it digitally. Here’s how.

Improving the user experience (UX)

Your charity probably uses its website to provide information and to raise funds through donations. What’s exciting about AI is that you can use it to make the information that your constituents need easier to find and access, and to make your online fundraising more effective.

One way you can do this is to use AI tools to analyse the layout of your website and use their knowledge of how large numbers of humans behave to suggest the areas that could be improved in order to become more effective.

For example, an AI tool called Attention Insight uses eye tracking data from around 70,000 people to analyse a web page and create a “heatmap” of the areas where users’ attention will be focused – with a claimed accuracy of over 90%.

This information can be used to adjust the layout of your charity’s webpages to ensure that the most important information is placed in the most prominent positions. Most importantly, if you decide to update your website or individual pages you can make adjustments before the updates go live.

A/B testing

If you are planning a fundraising initiative, then one way you can try to make it as effective as possible is to carry out A/B testing. Essentially that means creating two different fundraising pages for your website and testing which one is more effective at raising funds.

AI can help you carry out A/B testing in two ways. The first is by suggesting alternate copy and calls to action to test, and the second is by predicting which ones will be the most likely to be effective. You may still need to carry out a real A/B test on humans to check that the AI is accurate, but the artificial intelligence can certainly streamline the whole process.

abtesting.ai is an example of an AI-driven A/B testing tool.

Advanced applications of AI

The very best user experiences stem from so called “thin” user interfaces. These present as few hindrances as possible to users as they navigate a charity web site or mobile app. AI tools can build up a picture of users by analysing historical data about interactions on a website so that they can actually anticipate users’ actions.

The evolution of this is personalisation. This takes into account information about each individual user – or small groups of users that display similar behavioural characteristics – in order to display most prominently the content about the charity which is most relevant to that person or group.

Simpler AI tools which improve UX

If your charity updates its website regularly then this will likely involve adding new images. These usually need to be cropped and resized, or backgrounds may need to be cut out. These tasks are time consuming and fairly tedious for a human, but they can easily be automated using AI.

Similarly, new text added to your website may need to be translated into multiple languages depending on your charity’s constituents. Using a translator can be expensive, but most text can easily be translated into other languages using AI-powered translation tools.

Here’s another example. You may want to create a new colour palette for your website or just for a particular section or individual page. This is normally a task for a designer, but AI tools exist which can help you choose colour palettes from a photo or other image that you provide as a starting point.

Examples of these AI tools include:

• bg – this AI tool removes backgrounds from images – a task which can take a human many minutes but which it can complete almost instantly
• Colormind – an AI tool which finds colours that work together well – based in a single image you submit
• Letsenhance – like something out of a futuristic crime thriller, this AI tool takes a blurred or low-definition image and enhances it so that it becomes clear and higher definition

AI tools such as uizard can also help you create web pages or mobile apps from scratch by turning hand-drawn wireframes or layout outlines into editable web code.