- Why shouldn’t you rely solely on AI for UX improvements? AI tools can be 70% accurate, meaning 3 out of 10 UX suggestions may be wrong and harmful to your user experience since AI bases recommendations on generic best practices without understanding how real humans interact with your specific website.
- What is the main limitation of AI-generated UX suggestions? AI cannot create new ideas or test suggestions with actual users, so it provides generic recommendations that may result in a website identical to competitors rather than delivering a unique, engaging experience tailored to your audience.
- How can AI help summarize user feedback effectively? You can feed large amounts of user feedback into AI and ask it to identify trends, allowing you to quickly understand what customers say most frequently about your website without manually reviewing every comment.
- What testing assistance can AI provide for UX optimization? AI can generate suggestions for testing ideas on specific pages when you are unsure where to focus your conversion optimization efforts, helping you identify potential areas for improvement.
- How can AI assist with audience understanding? By feeding all your audience data into AI, you can generate detailed user profiles that provide a clear picture of who you are trying to reach with your messaging and design decisions.
Why you shouldn’t rely solely on AI to improve UX
You shouldn’t rely solely on AI to improve UX because its recommendations are often inaccurate, untested, and based on generic best practices that don’t reflect real user behavior. Without human expertise to validate and adapt those insights, AI can introduce harmful UX decisions and lead to a website that looks like everyone else’s—ultimately hurting engagement and conversions.
These days, marketers are using AI for everything. Writing copy. Analyzing data. Crafting social media posts.
And now, people are using it to help them with UX improvements to their website. Since UX is only going to grow in importance with AI search, the logical conclusion is to leverage AI to find those opportunities.
The problem is that AI isn’t perfect, which can hurt your UX if you take it at face value, and ultimately negatively impact your conversions.
In this blog:
Why you shouldn’t rely solely on AI to improve UX
On a recent podcast, Baymard Institute’s co-founder discussed how, if an AI tool is 70% accurate, that also means it’s wrong 30% of the time. When you think about it in terms of UX, that means that 3 out of 10 UX suggestions are wrong, and therefore, harmful to your UX.
And if you don’t have a trained eye that can sift through the bad suggestions and pull out the good, it can severely hurt your user experience.
Here’s the reality: AI is not human. It doesn’t interact with things like a human. Therefore, it can give UX suggestions that sound great on paper, but truly don’t work for your audience.
AI is basing its suggestions off of “best practices” that any UX expert knows to take with a grain of salt because they need to be tested. Many principles of UX change over time, simply because the user changes. So they’re more guidelines than anything — but AI doesn’t know that.
If you blindly follow what AI tools suggest without having expertise or giving it a second thought, you’re going to create a lot of bad UX on your website.
Not to mention, since AI can’t create new ideas or suggestions, you run the risk of creating a website that’s just like every other business following AI’s suggestions. It won’t help you stand out and deliver that desired experience that engages and delights your audience.
So overall, you don’t want to take AI’s UX suggestions as the ultimate solution, otherwise your UX (and by proxy, your conversions) will suffer. Instead, rely on real user feedback to guide you to making the best UX improvements.
How you can leverage AI to improve UX
While you don’t want to rely solely on AI to improve your UX, it doesn’t mean you can’t use it to help you.
Here’s how you can use AI to help you improve UX:
- Summarize feedback trends: Got a whole pile of user feedback you need to make sense of? Run it through AI and ask it to summarize trends for you, so you can see what people say the most about your website.
- Give you testing ideas: Not sure what you could test on a given page? Ask AI to give you suggestions on where you could focus your time to improve conversions.
- Generate user profiles: You can feed all your audience data to AI and ask it to generate user profiles for you, so you have a clear picture of who you’re trying to reach with your message.
Don’t make AI in the main character in your UX story
Don’t make the mistake of giving AI full control over the UX of your website. It can be wrong with its suggestions, so it’s important that you always have a trained and skilled eye reviewing all UX decisions to ensure you’re delivering the best experience.
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