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January 18, 2024
In the fast-paced world of artificial intelligence (AI), new technology is continuously influencing the ways we work as professionals in the user experience (UX) industry.
As a UX Researcher, I’ve noticed a surge in resources for research, design, and product teams that are marketing AI-powered capabilities. Here at CXperts we are excited about the ways AI has supercharged the UX industry and are finding ways to incorporate these tools into our daily workflow.
Many of our technology partners are leaders in this space and we've had the privilege of speaking with them about the intersection of AI & UX.
This article is the first of a multi-part series where we’ll share key insights from these conversations. Our first partner in this series is AB Tasty, a leader in experience optimization.
AB Tasty empowers brands to build better digital experiences for customers using personalization, experimentation, recommendations, search, and the market’s only emotions-based segmentation solution in an all-in-one optimization platform. We are thrilled to introduce our conversation partners, Alix de Sagazan, CEO & Co-Founder, and Mary Kate Cash, Head of Growth Marketing.
Alix, with a background in economics, business administration, and marketing, founded AB Tasty in Paris in 2013. She has since led AB Tasty to be a global leader, with more than 1000 enterprises using their AB Tasty and Flagship solutions to provide optimal end-user experiences.
Mary Kate, leveraging a decade of experience in scaling teams and processes in the SaaS industry, serves as the Head of Growth Marketing for North America.
In my conversation with Alix and Mary Kate, we discussed their perspectives on AI’s influence in the user experience industry, how AB Tasty leverages AI, and the potential trajectory of AI & UX. This conversation sheds light on AI’s impact on the testing and optimization landscape, as well as the possibilities ahead.
Mary Kate:
Speaking specifically about UX, AI can open up an understanding of how people experience digital products at a much more accelerated rate than we can using current methods.
Alix:
You are going to have more ideas. AI is going to enhance your ideas. This is something that I do when I ask ChatGPT to write me an email. It’s helping me, but it’s giving me ideas as well.
For insights and ideas, you are going to have more, and then when you are going to create tests, you are going to have more results more quickly.
Especially a success tool like AB Tasty, where we are based on creativity - you want to personalize, you want to adapt the customer journey - it’s amazing for us because it’s like a field of possibility that is totally endless.
Alix:
Since the beginning with AB Tasty, we have tried to empower digital teams - to make teams more agile, to run more campaigns - because if they put out more campaigns they are going to optimize more of the website. With AI, we want to be able to propose more test ideas and have faster results. So the ultimate goal will be to be able to test every piece of the website faster - with of course the human, controlling and managing that, but yes, I think we are going to solve the problems of our clients faster. We are going to be faster. This is the key for me.
Mary Kate:
I think faster and with more options, so instead of going to your dev team and saying hey, I need this code snippet to do this thing, you can use the AI assistant feature within the AB Tasty platform and ask the AI to build the code for you. And it can also build you something that your dev team couldn't or that they say is going to take a long time, or is further down their priority list.
Alix:
One example is testing new imagery. Before AI, you would go to a bank of images and sort through it yourself. Well now, AI is going to just give you 100 images and you could test them all automatically.
Mary Kate:
To add onto this, maybe we want to use these images, but they're actually really expensive. We don't need to buy stock photos anymore because we can have AI generate them. It's going to save us money.
In marketing everything costs something. Even if it's my time that I spend doing a task, it costs money. And so if I can spend less time doing tasks that are of lower value, and AI can do that for me instead, then I can do something that is more strategic with my time.
Instead of picking out stock photography and having stock image services as a budget line item of mine, I can take that off and spend that money doing something really great for our customers and treating our customers to something nice, which is probably from their perspective more appreciated than the money that I'm spending on buying stock photography. So it's all a matter of thinking about where you're spending your time and money and whether it is going to the right places. Of course, this is just one example, but you can extrapolate this to many different aspects of a marketing team’s resources.
Mary Kate:
I still think there needs to be a human checking over these things. For instance in marketing, AI might write articles for you, but it must align with our brand tone and not say anything that’s out of left field. You just need to make sure that people have that oversight to make sure that AI is staying within the guidelines that you want.
Alix:
As far as putting together a campaign, the human is deciding this because it’s an instinctive human capability. So I don't see a lot of threats from AI on our side. Since the beginning, our tool has been helping teams make decisions. It's going to be the same but it's going to be with more options and it's going to be faster with the help of AI.
Alix:
Certainly, maybe as a form of uniformization. At some point you can say, hey, I am a travel website, can you give me some ideas on what all the other travel websites are doing, and then everything is going to start being the same.
Mary Kate:
Everything does start to look the same. And it’s important for people to understand that AI is only as good as the models that it's trained on. It's important for people to think outside of their industry sometimes to say hey, I'm a travel website - what are all of the other travel websites and what are they doing that I should be doing better? - but maybe also, what is this ecommerce company doing that I could be doing better? - to look outside of their industry and see if you can incorporate elements of other industries that are doing really well trying new things. I mean, that's what testing is all about - trying to kind of get out of that uniformity a little bit.
Alix:
It’s going to enhance the capabilities of humans. It’s going to stop some jobs, but it’s going to create other jobs. And I think that the good thing is it’s going to create those jobs with more creativity. It’s going to enhance the creativity of people.
We are in a sector and in a field where there are endless possibilities. And we have a solid tool today. We have 1000 clients. We have an amazing team of 300 people. So I think that we have a great place to innovate and to propose better things to our clients and we are able to put in the investment to innovate. I think we are lucky because it's quite exciting.
The ideas from Alix and Mary Kate are exactly the perspectives we are excited to share through this article series. For a testing and optimization tool like AB Tasty, AI acts as an accelerator by generating ideas, running the test, and analyzing recommendations. And while AI will continue to create efficiencies, humans are still key in determining project goals, testing priorities, key metrics, and are giving AI somewhere to focus.
Alix believes that AI can improve the efficiency of every job at AB Tasty. If you have AI helping with basic tasks, it opens up the opportunity to focus your job to be more strategic, more interesting. You can use more brain power and create jobs with more value.
This opportunity for creativity is exactly what we need to be able to innovate and offer better experiences in the digital and physical world.
Be sure to stay tuned for the following parts of our AI & UX series featuring experts from more of our technology partners.
You can reach out to CXperts at hello@cxperts.io with any questions on UX, AI, or anything in between.
Resources
https://www.userinterviews.com/blog/ai-in-ux-research-report
https://www.userinterviews.com/blog/ai-ux-research-tools
https://maze.co/blog/ai-research-vision/
https://maze.co/blog/ai-meets-ux-research/
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