Now responsive web design is finally making its way into many websites, there is something new to look forward too. While Intelligent Web Design isn’t something new, it is often only seen at larger websites such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. But there are plenty of ways to power your website with intelligent features. By having basic knowledge about PHP and databases you’ll understand most of the concepts I’m going to explain. In this article I’ll introduce you to the basics of Intelligent Web Design.
Thinking one step ahead of the user
Take Google Search for example; when the user makes a mistake he doesn’t necessarily have to confirm the correct search term. The system is automatically showing the results for the mistyped search query while leaving options open to choose for the “incorrect” term.
An intelligent system learns from the mistakes of its users. In the above example the search algorithm learned that many users who typed something like “pncake” were actually visiting links referring to pancakes instead of pncake.
Artificial intelligence can be described as the study and design of intelligent agents where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success.
Taking that into notice, there are many ways to use Artificial Intelligence in web design. The website has to adapt itself to the user, not vice versa. A great example would be a website with NSFW (not safe for work) content that automatically knows if you’re at work by looking at the current geo-location if it differs from your home location. The user can choose to select different locations as unsafe and the website will keep this into account.
Intelligent Information Architecture
Another interesting concept would be the ability for websites to change their structure according to what the user is doing. Let’s say you have an online clothing store, and 64% of your potential customers are often looking at gray trousers. An intelligent system could bring all the gray trousers to a higher level in your page structure either by moving them up in the search results or re-arranging the page navigation.
People like personalized and relevant content similar to their interests. When you have a website with a lot of content / information it might be a hard job to show the information without overwhelming the user. A simple solution would be to look at the behavior of the user. If the user often visits links such as interior or real estate you might want to show these kind of posts some more automatically. Being adaptive means to truly look at what the user is doing, and optimize the content accordingly. Which might eventually lead to more visitors for your website, in combination with good SEO.
Unfortunately Intelligent Web Design is not much documented, as it’s quite new for the average web designer. I expect this to play a very important role in web design in the near future, and it sure is a very interesting topic to think about.