Overview

It’s ten months into 2023; this makes it a great time to look retrospectively at the digital design trends for the year. Staying on top of these trends is a pretty cool way to ensure any website or app you’re working on fits your goals, whether user engagement, visibility and click-through rate or increasing sales and conversion.

We catch up with some of our Minders on what trends they’ve seen when working on our partner’s projects, round up some noticeable themes and provide some behind-the-scenes insight into Mindera’s work. We will focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for this part of the series. Stay tuned for our upcoming pieces on Augmented Reality, and Accessibility and Inclusivity.

What’s an explanation of a trend without a concrete example of how we’ve put this into practice? Read on to find out how Mindera has used AI in our work.

Artificial Intelligence Design Trends

Artificial Intelligence is a word on many people’s lips, and this is becoming more mainstream with its evolution.

Many businesses have been weighing up the pros and cons of the technology, with around 42% of companies exploring implementing AI in the future.

Using AI research tools, UX designers can quickly analyse and collect large amounts of data. Saving time and gathering quick user data can help your product designer make informed decisions about the user journey on your pages; this can naturally help with your goals. Streamlining processes like this can also help identify areas for improvement, which contributes to the creation of stronger websites and apps.

From the data collected, AI tools can extend into creating a user persona. Understanding user sentiment massively helps develop actionable insights for your design roadmap.

AI also has its uses in making the user journey a lot more intuitive and straightforward.

How cool is that? Read on to find out more.

Enhancement Over Replacement: Harnessing AI to Elevate Human Potential - A note from PO Dyego Vasconcelos

The transformative power of AI is undeniable. It has already touched and will continue to touch every field of human knowledge in countless ways.

There is considerable talk about AI replacing human jobs; should this be our immediate concern? Rather than fearing that an algorithm in software programming may replace us, wouldn't it make more sense to think about how a skilled programmer could exponentially increase the code output? How about focusing on the creativity aspect of the delivery and allowing the machine to accelerate certain tasks?

AI alone doesn't miraculously turn low-quality instances into high-quality ones. However, it can greatly assist with the right input and guidance.

Let's consider an example of an image recognition system using AI, particularly a facial recognition system.

If a low-quality image (blurred, poorly lit, obscured) of a person's face is provided to the system, the AI will probably struggle to identify the person accurately. This is because the initial low-quality image does not provide the sufficient and clear information that the AI algorithm requires to perform its function accurately. The machine learning techniques used in AI rely heavily on accurate data; poor quality input will inevitably generalise less effectively, potentially leading to inaccurate results.

On the other hand, if a clear and well-lit image of the same person is provided, AI can work wonders. It can use complex algorithms to analyse each tiny detail of the face – the distance between the eyes, the shape of the cheekbones, the width of the nose, etc. It then can compare these features against its database of known faces to find a match.

In this case, the quality input (the clear and well-lit photo) allows the AI to function effectively and deliver accurate results. Good initial data quality led to high performance from the AI system.

This example can be extended to many areas.

Imagine a Product Owner crafting a user story and discussing it with stakeholders to comprehend the issue fully. Can AI assist? Yes. AI can help structure the story, improving results dependent on the quality of collected inputs already outlined in a scope understanding process. Novice Product Owners might find it helpful, but seasoned ones may see their quality skyrocket if they effectively utilise this technology.

Shifting the AI conversation from fear of replacement to the power of enhancement, which allows us to perform better, be more innovative, and, ultimately, more human, is what should drive us forward!

Mindera & AI

It’s all well and good to know the emerging AI trends, but what good is that unless you can see where these things have been used in real-life industry examples?

Travel

Diving into the travel industry, we helped one of our partners develop a Chat Assistant. Picture planning a trip through Europe, but instead of spending countless hours researching routes and attractions, you instead have a handy AI-powered travel companion, a pocket-sized virtual tour guide. Our AI friend not only suggests routes but can also help create an entire travel narrative for you, which streamlines the travel process.

It's not just a travel assistant—it's your personal storyteller, turning your travels into an unforgettable narrative. Say goodbye to tedious planning and hello to an AI-powered, personalised, and engaging travel experience.

Fashion

Shining the magnifying glass onto a Fashion Tech project for one of our partners - imagine a virtual shopping assistant so intelligent that it can guide your browsing experience in real-time. Our client project is pushing boundaries to bring this vision to life.

Imagine saying, "Show me leather shoes," instead of scrolling and clicking through countless options; the AI takes the wheel. The Large Language Model (LLM) springs into action, decoding your request and interacting with the website as you would, bringing up the best leather shoes to match your preferences.

And it doesn't stop at text. Upload an image of a fashion piece you love, and the LLM, understanding the essence of the image, guides the web interface to display similar products. It's like having a personal shopper, a fashion-savvy friend, and an intuitive search engine all rolled into one seamless online experience.

The future of online shopping is here, where instead of you adapting to the website, the website, steered by our AI, adapts to you.

Cláudio Teixeira, Account Owner, Mindera Labs, discussed how:

“With the right thinking in place, AI-powered tools can help at every stage of the design process and the speed of design delivery. When talking about web design trends, we are reaching for the “new stuff”. Web designers (yes, the human ones!) are on the cutting edge of novelty, and they embrace it, making innovation part of their culture. Experimenting (and ultimately starting to use) AI is “just” another step in the novelty journey.”

Diogo Velho, AI Researcher at Mindera Labs, commented on how:

“It's not just about consuming information anymore; it's about engaging in dynamic interactions. AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard are changing how we interact with online content, transforming passive browsing into active conversations.

"Imagine this: instead of navigating through a myriad of web pages, you're having a dialogue with a smart AI. You ask it to "Find me the latest news on climate change," and within seconds, it provides you with a concise summary of the most recent and relevant articles, eliminating the need to sift through endless search results.

"Here, the user experience isn't dictated by the limitations of a web page's static design. Instead, it's dynamically shaped by the user's interaction with the AI, creating a more personalised, efficient, and engaging browsing experience. This could be the dawn of the Conversational Web, where text and AI form the crux of online interaction, seamlessly integrating information retrieval, online tasks, and digital communication into one interactive, AI-driven dialogue.”

Final Thoughts

In this article, we’ve dived into some notable AI themes, starting with data & AI uses, and user personas, AI and enhancing human potential, and AI at Mindera.

Touching on AI and human potential, Product Owner Dyego Vasconcelos shared some fascinating insights into the ongoing debates surrounding AI replacing human jobs. A key point to take away from this is: “Rather than fearing that an algorithm in software programming may replace us, wouldn't it make more sense to think about how a skilled programmer could exponentially increase the code output? How about focusing on the creativity aspect of the delivery and allowing the machine to accelerate certain tasks?”

When exploring AI trends, we dived into our partner’s Travel Chat Assistant, a tremendous pocket-sized tool for making travelling more seamless and enjoyable. We also looked into a Fashion Tech project that uses an LLM to show you what you want to see when browsing fashion - a trend definitely on the rise in the e-commerce space right now!

Stay tuned for some upcoming pieces in this series on Augmented Reality and Accessibility and inclusivity too.

What AI themes have you seen in 2023?

Get in touch if we can help you on your digital product journey.