How AI Is Driving User Experience

Flow Fournier, senior UX manager at RBBi, explains how the incentives to drive AIpowered strategies in the region are stronger than ever

REMEMBER THE TIME you needed a new outfit and would simply go to the tailor to get it fitted for you? If not, it’s probably because you weren’t born before the Industrial Revolution or don’t usually indulge in what is now mostly reserved for high-end garments. Instead, we have grown accustomed to choosing among standard sizes or even trying to change ourselves to fit the clothing.

The same goes for most products of the standardisation era. Historically, designers have gathered data (market surveys, product feedback and viewership statistics) to try and identify relevant content for audiences to consume. Based on the quality of data available these decisions would range from informed to educated guesses.

This ‘one-size-fits-most’ model was inherited from the publishing and diffusion age, where the aim once again was to find that one piece of content that would have the maximum impact. Think TV audiences or newspaper readership.

But on the users’ end, the quality of experience matters more than the quantity. Following this principle, the personalisation trend that started about a decade ago (popular and trending content) has become the new norm. Companies can now capture value from users in the form of the data they provide by using their services. That value is then redistributed in turn, to users in the shape of a customised (and in most cases superior) experience.

Techniques such as collaborative filtering used every day by large companies suggest personalised content to their users, effectively transferring the choice of content from designers and publishers to ‘users that are similar to you’. Rather than assuming what is the best experience for most cheap data and dynamic content delivery lets companies deliver a good experience for each user.

UNDERSTANDING IS CARING