You may have heard the terms UI or UX before. Often people confuse the two and somehow think they are interchangeable. The truth is they are not. While they do go hand in hand they are very different. Before we talk about the differences, let us delve deeper into what they are.
UX Design stands for User Experience design. This simply refers to the Users experience or interaction with a product or service. Is the experience straightforward? Is it easy for them to complete the task at hand? Is it a smooth interaction? UX design can be used for physical products like a car or a digital experience like online shopping or using an app on your phone.
UI Design stands for User Interface design. This focuses on the user’s visual experience. The ‘look and feel’, or personality if you will, of the product. Take an online shop, while UX covers the ease of use, UI will focus on the visual design of it. For instance, when the customer clicks on a button, will the button change noticeably so that they know that the action was successful?
While they are very different they need each other for the product to be successful. As Rahul Varshney points out: “User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) are some of the most confused and misused terms in our field. A UI without UX is like a painter slapping paint onto canvas without thought; while UX without UI is like the frame of a sculpture with no paper mache on it. A great product experience starts with UX followed by UI. Both are essential for the product’s success.”
Now that you have a rough idea of what they are we will focus on their differences.
Useful vs. Visually Pleasing: UX focuses on making the product useful while UI ensures the product is beautiful.
Task vs. Connection: While a good UX design will have your users completing their goals successfully, UI needs to help them form a personal connection, which will lead to brand loyalty.
Products, Services and Interfaces: UX is used for products, services and interfaces. UI is only used for interfaces.
Unless your website is built to optimise your customer experience, your users will go elsewhere. There are thousands of competitors who are looking to take away your customers. Remember, your customers want to not only complete the task at hand, like purchasing your new range of hoodies, they also want the whole process to be as smooth and as quick a possible without having to struggle to find what they are looking for. If it gets too complicated, or cumbersome they will go in search of another site.
So where does Pathwwway come in? Pathwwway does is a company building software for optimisation of product for big companies, built around creating high quality experiences for your customers. Pathwwway has a full-time, in-house team of UI & UX experts whose sole aim is to ensure your online interaction with your customers will result in them coming back to you time and time again.
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To understand the “Why” of A.I, you need to understand the “What” first. Artificial Intelligence or A.I is the ability for computers to perform tasks previously requiring human intelligence, which means we are teaching computers to process information similarly to how we process it. The difference being that once the computer “brain”, if you will, understands its task it performs said task at greater speeds than you or I could ever imagine. While you may be getting flashes of scenes from I.R Robot or feel that The Terminator predicted how this would end for us, I don’t believe we are quite at the point where we need to be worried about “ Skynet”…..yet!
So for A.I to work as we hope it will we need to teach computers how we want them to process the information they gather. To do this we need to teach them our core fundamentals and values in order for them to respect the end customer and understand the value of self-responsibility.
You may be asking, “How do you teach a computer?”, that is a great question, and involves quite a bit of technical jargon, but basically involves software developers creating learning programs that teach the computers how to process the information set before them. I know you were imagining a computer sitting at it’s desk while it’s teacher was at the black board in front writing out the ABC’s, no? was it just me? Any way back to the training programs or algorithms, they come in three subsets; these are Supervised, Semi-Supervised and then Unsupervised. The first 2 involve sets of training data that help teach and guide the computers towards the desired results. The last stage is what some may call the holy grail of machine learning. This is where the computer figures out what the data means on its own without the help of developers.
Why should you use A.I as a tool in your marketing toolbelt?
Now that we have a slightly better understanding of what A.I is and how it learns, we need to understand why it is beneficial if not necessary for businesses to stay at the forefront of data mining, collection and processing. As I mentioned before, computers process information at far great speeds than humans can, and once they know what to look for then the process becomes quite streamlined. Data is the cornerstone of any great marketing campaigns, without it you may as well just stand at the robots handing out pamphlets hoping to get a sale.
Data mining and analysis, considered to be time consuming, tedious and sometimes difficult, when introduced to A.I the process becomes streamlined. You go from doing manual research to inputting your requirements into the A.I and getting out the best actionable options.
In the world of digital media, we are bombarded with so many options to market our products. This leaves us with so many questions, like When to advertise, What media platform should we use and who is the best target audience on that platform? The goal is ultimately to get the greatest return on investment, R.O.I. You know what I mean. How many times have you advertised on a popular Social Media platform, but received no actionable leads or adequate return on your investment? Frustrating isn’t even an adequate way to describe the process. Too often businesses will just give up on the whole idea of digital marketing.
Technologically, talkingAds developed a robot which they use to buy media for their clients. This is not an open platform, but rather a service for their exclusive clients.
Ok, so what is TalkingAds you speak of?
TalkingAds specialises in mass scale programmatic media buying using A.I to track and analyse the best way to buy media for your brand, across all digital media purchase platform that exists today, to reach your target audience and get the best results from said media buy channel.
Not sure what all that meant? Basically any digital platform that you can use to advertise on, like Facebook, Google etc, is tracked to see which posts are getting the best results. Remember earlier when we discussed algorithms and machine learning? Well this is where that comes in, the A.I created by Talking Ads has been taught what to look for, and how best to use that information to increase the R.O.I.
Why trust the A.I created by Talking Ads? The CEO of Talking Ads, explains that “ Before deciding on the correct media buy channel, we trained the system with the company’s core values.” He goes on to say that “We put emphasis on teaching the system to act with respect to the end customer, and we also taught the system the value of self-responsibility, which means prioritising each action every few steps of operation.”
