AI-Powered User Testing – The Future Of Marketing

User testing has always been an imperative part of website development, but with the rise of AI-powered UX testing, the marketing industry is undergoing a significant transformation that all businesses want to be a part of!

In this blog, we talk about what user testing is, its benefits and how AI is revolutionising traditional testing methods.

What Is AI-Powered User Testing

User testing is a research method that uses real people in real time to evaluate a website, product or service by observing their interactions and gathering feedback. Its insights reveal what users think about and how they perceive your website, product or service, which you can then use to inform development decisions.

On the other hand, AI testing uses advanced algorithms to test with real users, providing quicker and more accurate feedback that helps to improve UX. Over the last few years, its growing importance in marketing has caught the eye of many businesses, which is the reason why there’s also a growing demand to learn more about what is possibly the most transformational technology.

Nowadays, artificial intelligence (AI) helps marketers to make sense of UX research data and better understand their audience by predicting how they will behave next and what they will want to purchase or consume in the future.

AI can make the user testing process less laborious and more streamlined by automating repetitive tasks, and freeing up time for experts to innovate. AI-driven testing provides faster and more efficient methods of catching defects, transforming how companies create and execute user tests.

The Need For User Testing In Marketing

User testing is crucial if you want to create effective marketing strategies, as it enables you to determine whether your website, product or service is sufficiently “usable” for your users to achieve their objectives.

Also, what we love seeing about user experience testing is that it can help you get to know your users on a deeper level whilst offering you new perspectives on your design. After running a UX test, users may even engage in ways you didn’t anticipate when you created it.

However, traditional UX testing methods have a few limitations, such as:

time-consuming processes
subjective interpretations
it takes a lot of time to plan and collect data
it’s always hard to figure out why usability issues happen
it’s hard to create the right setting
you can’t evaluate long-term experiences with testing

This leads us to the rapidly growing need for more scalable and objective user testing approaches in the digital age – and here’s where AI shines!

AI & User Testing: A Powerful Combination

While we’ve all heard rumours that machines and artificial intelligence will eventually supplant humans, this is not the case, even more so in user and usability testing. User testing has always relied heavily on the involvement and participation of humans, both as designers and as consumers.

However, using AI when conducting user experience testing for design processes is a much more holistic approach than the one used to test traditional designs, and it can support the efforts of designers and researchers by:

speeding up the testing process
offering more scalability and accuracy
reducing manual human effort
making people more efficient and saving time
providing machine learning-based insight
incorporating eye tracking
Incorporating facial recognition

At Lnet Digital, our favourite perk of using AI-powered testing methods is that we can analyse vast amounts of user data to uncover valuable insights for our clients in a very short amount of time. And we do so through Biometric UX Testing with Eye Tracking and Facial Recognition Technology!

AI-Powered User Testing Techniques

And now, let’s explore in more depth our top 2 methods of AI-powered user testing techniques that are shaping the future of marketing today.

Eye Tracking Technology

We use eye tracking to determine where users’ attention is focused within a design and how they navigate through screens and interfaces. These studies require specialised equipment to reveal eye movement patterns and heatmaps of where people concentrate their attention whilst interacting with a digital asset.

A simple example that applies to many of our ecommerce clients is the checkout flow, where we want users to focus on critical information and complete the checkout process without being distracted. And all of this can happen thanks to AI, the reason why we can simulate eye-tracking studies and provide valuable insights into user attention and behaviour.

Eye tracking equipment can track and show where a person is looking, and to do so, it uses a special light to create a reflection in the person’s eyes. Then cameras in the tracker capture those reflections and use them to estimate the position and movement of the eyes. That data is then projected onto the UI, resulting in a visualisation of where the participants look – AI at its best!

We then use this eye tracking data to understand how people navigate, read, interact and process webpages which allowed us to yield major findings for our customers.

Facial Recognition Technology

Facial recognition technology is the least intrusive biophysical measure of emotion, making it much more effective than any other technology available today!

Generally speaking, a user’s facial expression change as they navigate a website or app is minor. However, our studies suggest that facial recognition is a fairly good predictor of both frustration and enjoyment – key emotions that are important to capture when testing websites or creating user journey maps.

Recognising these facial expressions and attributes can help us to classify a person’s mental and emotional state throughout a user testing session. We utilise facial recognition and eye tracking to provide a more detailed view of users’ experiences – once again, AI is the show’s star.

If you want to see a real-life case study of how our AI-powered UX testing helped one of our clients increase their sales and conversions, check out our UX Biometric Research To Dive Deeper Into CRO Case Study!

Benefits & Uses Of AI-Powered User Testing

There are many benefits of why businesses and marketers should use AI-powered user testing, and we will look at our top 5 in more detail now.

Faster Testing

AI-powered user testing can significantly reduce the time required for testing digital experiences. This is because AI can analyse large amounts of data very fast, which means that testing can be completed in a fraction of the time it would take with manual testing.

Improved Accuracy

AI algorithms are highly accurate and can identify even the smallest anomalies in digital experiences, which can help businesses to identify and fix issues before they become a problem for their customers.

Cost Effective

The cost of testing digital experiences can be significantly reduced with AI since it requires fewer resources and can be completed in less time.

Scalability

AI-powered testing can scale to meet the needs of large enterprises as the amount of data and digital experiences grow, and AI algorithms can be easily set to analyse the data and provide insights at scale.

Final Thoughts

To conclude, if there’s one takeaway we’d love for you to have from this article is that AI-driven insights can lead to data-driven decision-making and improved marketing strategies that could truly skyrocket your business!

The immense potential of AI-powered user testing in shaping the future of marketing is a growing topic amongst marketers, and we encourage you to embrace AI-driven methodologies to stay ahead in the competitive marketing landscape.

Do you want to improve your user testing and increase your business value in a highly competitive marketplace? Then you could work with an agency specialising in evidence-based User Experience like us!

To experience what your users see and feel about your products and services in real-time, contact us today! During your FREE consultation, we can explain our UX Testing Service and find the best way for you and your business to get to know your customers better than ever, so you can increase your Customer Experience & ROI in no time!

You can call us on 0116 218 4000 or email us at [email protected], and one of our friendly and experienced team members will be happy to assist you!