Your customers, aka your users, matter most. They keep your company afloat. Your online offerings and their online experience provide major keys to your success. You can use machine learning, also known as artificial intelligence, to improve the user experience (UX). Here’s how.
Cookies
The ubiquitous cookie provides a powerful data gathering tool. You can set up your web site to place a cookie on every visitor’s computer, so long as they allow their browser to accept them. A cookie gathers information as they visit. A tracking cookie maps their Internet activity after they leave your site providing information into their visits to your competitors or shopping activity on unrelated retail sites. The cookie transmits data to you. Collectively, it provides you big data to crunch to build a better website for all. Separately, it lets you recognize the user when they return to your website and cater to their likes based upon their last visit.
Website Source Code
Your website can now contain much more than simple markup language to present information. What began with HTML expanded as computer scientists developed that code to integrate other languages. Languages like CSS provide the beautiful pages users want to navigate, while more powerful languages like JavaScript, PHP and the .ASP architecture enabled complex code and virtual applications to serve the user from a website. Your business can harness these algorithms to improve user experience and combine them with cookie data for more powerful knowledge acquisition.
Internal algorithms use two methods:
- supervised learning,
- unsupervised learning.
Supervised learning utilizes a limited data set to begin – a user’s initial visit. The algorithm trains itself on that data and uses it to react to future visits.
Future visits provide further opportunities to collect and integrate new data. Enter unsupervised learning. It lets you add to data. It uses algorithms to analyze user behavior patterns. It combines past choices with the current visit to predict future visit behavior.
Big Data
What was once the darling of data crunching at the NSF and NASA now helps businesses better cater to customers. What once required super computers can now be accomplished in the cloud. The collected data from all users, once analyzed, provides insight into user website preferences. Coupled with data from surveys which tells the web designer what they’re doing wrong in the design, this provides design information to improve the UX.
Machine learning helps your business improve its web design and any apps it develops. Using cookies, integrated algorithms and big data, you can improve the UX incrementally each time a user visits.
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