Conversational AI, digital human and UX

21-Oct-2021

Digital Human in eCommerce
The landscape of eCommerce has shifted, maybe more than any other time in history. The purchasing behaviors of the consumers (users) have shifted towards online and mobile channels. According to a 2019 Microsoft report, 72% of people say they have performed a voice search through a digital assistant for their purchase.
Microsoft research report

The most happening thing in the user experience space is the Digital Human. Consumers (users) engage with technology using voice commands to interact or buy things with help of a Digital Human.

Technology and Process
Digital Humans are AI-powered, human-like personas who create a unique engaging, dynamic, and lifelike experience to connect with the consumers (user), meaning they can recreate “real” human conversations with help of advances in technology like deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) to communicate with machines in our own language. NLP is where linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence come together to allow machines to hear and understand human speech.

Digital Humans embody the personality, voice and nature of the brands they work with. They can emote happiness, empathy, warmth and friendliness. They can even crack a joke or show support through their actions, tone and body language. For example, when a user logs in for the second time for his/her purchase, it recognizes the current user emotion, and where/what the user left. Using this, the Digital Human will guide the user with the purchase. If the user mentions a forthcoming vacation and is looking happy and excited about it, Digital Human understands the user's behavior and will match his/her happiness through its emotions and expressions.

Just 7% of our conversation is made up of the words we say– the rest is how we speak it using tone of voice and body language.

Benefits of Digital Human
Digital humans can be brand ambassadors, founders, mascots, or any other existing personality. They recreate human emotions because the human touch is so valuable in creating an emotional connection with consumers (users). Digital Humans are today’s solution that can create a scalable human-like emotional reciprocity and customer experience to the digital world.

Digital Human impact on User
The consumers (users) can interact with a digital human via any device you (or they) choose — through a website, mobile browser/app, or a kiosk. Interacting Digital Human is just like how consumers (users) interact with a physical store in a conventional way. Users of all ages, physical limitations, or literacy can ask anything in any way.

Conversational Digital Human simplifies everyday tasks. For retailers, that means the consumers (users) can use their voice to find the item they need, make an order, pay for it, track it, and leave feedback. Later, they can use purchase history to reorder their products. It can be utilized in both online and physical shops.

In situations where consumers (users) are busy cooking, washing the dishes, or driving a car they can use the Digital Human feature which brings valuable experiences and improves the entire conversation.

UX and Digital Human Interface
Designing a Digital Human UI that meets user expectations can be very challenging. Users have been habitual to making adjustments when an app or device needs more input, but the psychology of repeating a spoken command is different. The primary aspect of user experience as designers, we should not encourage the users to click or tap to complete any task while having conversations with Digital Human, in this case, a multi-modal interaction will increase the user’s cognitive load. The designers need to start from detailed personas, work around potential limitations of the specific user journey, and make the best use of all possible action triggers.

The exciting future of Digital Human User Interface

Versatile: Users can speak in a language of their choice, the conversation is natural
Personal: Entire interaction is customized
Convenient: Collapsed menus; make all options top-level
Relatable: It is not only looking at the product or service, users can interact with Digital Humans and also take suggestions from them.
Superbrain: Enable user with access to accurate information quickly

Consumers are demanding personal relationships and expect more from brands to build trust and customer loyalty, as conversational AI continues to rise, so does the need for building two-dimensional ways to connect with consumers that goes beyond the existing text, chat, or voice-based tools, with Digital People, eCommerce can connect with their customers in a powerful new way and transform simple online shopping into engaging and meaningful relationships at scale.