How AI website builders can damage user experience and your business
We will provide comments on AI website builders, including the potential damage to your business and user experience.
How AI website builders can damage user experience and your business
Many AI website builders promise to create a website for your business in just a few seconds. But this begs the question, ‘Are any of them better than a seasoned web designer?’.
Your website is your online shop or office premises. Your virtual footprint of the internet. It should inform, convert and raise awareness of your business to everyone who visits. But before signing up for an AI website builder, it’s worth noting that relying on this method can damage your business by providing a sub-par customer and user experience.
Hiring a professional’s knowledge provides unrivalled service, skill, creativity and value in generating leads and sales. As with most commercial investments, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably will disappoint or restrict your options in the future, as this article will explore.
Your time is valuable – don’t waste it
AI website builders emphasise that they can save their users time that would have otherwise been spent coding. This prospect sounds attractive when you consider the complexity of code required to power and customise a website to the way you envisioned it.
Saving time and training may sway many decision makers, especially at companies with tighter budgets, to try options such as Durable, Dorik and Wix. But be aware that many AI website builders only give a small space, prompts or text boxes to answer key questions about your business and its sector.
This can result in website designs that need significant alterations to reflect the nature of your business. Creating frustration, Forbes lists the potentially “time-consuming” nature of editing AI website builder designs as one of the “cons” (or disadvantages) of this tech.
Wix, who now offers an AI website builder feature, alludes to this when they note, “If you’d like to make changes, ask the AI to regenerate the site or tweak specific elements (such as the theme or structure) of the site brief”. Yet this requires skill when prompting AI, which could find you feeling frustrated, unable to achieve what you want to see.
It takes time to refine an AI design. Also, there are no guarantees that it can understand or create a suitable design that you would want to represent your business.
You will lose the creative skill of a web designer
Hiring our award-winning services at thefingerprint, means that you are accessing the creativity, on-the-job experience and training of our team.
Plus, if you want to prompt an AI website builder, this assumes that you already have specific design elements in mind.
These may include the:
- Colours
- Typography
- Layout
- Inclusion of videos and images.
These aspects matter when persuading web visitors to trust you with their business and hard-earned money. A human designer will take onboard colour psychology and any negative cultural associations which AI is not renowned for. This can attract new audiences (boosting sales) and save you from losing lucrative customers or clients.
Part of a web designer’s job is to work with you to inspire a dynamic design, usually creating an emotional response in the visitor that aligns with your brand. Unlike AI’s inability to gauge the overall site’s UX (user experience), human web designers consider the customer’s journey through your sales funnel and WordPress website.
It can look the same as other businesses
The same Forbes article referenced above makes another compelling argument for outsourcing to a human designer. It highlights how “The layouts of the AI website builders often look similar and can appear basic”.
This standardisation of AI website designs will likely hold you back when trying to stand out in your industry. You may even discover that a competitor has generated the same design and customers confuse the two.AI website builders rarely offer you and your business the same customer service that any self-respecting designer will. From listening to your needs on client calls and building rapport to email correspondence and potentially fewer revisions, AI-generated sites have not yet been able to adopt the necessary soft skills clients expect.
Stand out from the crowd and use professional designers, copywriters and photographers to create unique design and content to best showcase your business!
Costly design mistakes are possible
Many AI website builders will rely on their free or low-cost pricing as a unique selling point. And this has persuaded many businesses to rely on generative AI, such as ChatGPT, to create their website.
All of this sounds fine. However, images are sometimes not aligned or centred correctly. This could see your AI website builder cropping the head of your employer or team members from the original photo. Customers will find these errors unappealing and might go elsewhere wondering, “Why didn’t anyone check this website before publishing?”.
Poor design affects your brand’s reputation. If your website looks chaotic, quickly assembled and unpolished, it can negatively affect the public’s perception of your capabilities and professionalism. The same extends to the copywriting, infographics and videography you publish.
Security issues surrounding AI website builders
Perhaps the most concerning aspect of using AI website builders is the possibility that your site’s security and customers or members’ data may become at risk.
HubSpot raises a key point here. There are “some privacy concerns when using AI” builders. This hinges on the way AI collects user information to customise it. HubSpot continues, “You may not be able to protect your users’ information as diligently as you typically would”, as it may move through a third-party AI tool.
Due to AI’s ungoverned nature, it is unclear who will be responsible for errors in this area of data privacy. However, GDPR should always be prioritised when building and running your website.
Trust in human expertise and creativity
Many businesses may be weighing up the idea of using AI website builders to create a site in record time (with limited costs). However, AI lives up to its name ‘artificial intelligence’. It has none of the creativity, empathy with clients and customers, or emotional intelligence that a human designer has. AI websites sit within a relatively small design pool compared to human-designed sites’ originality. It may also cause poor user experience and attention to detail, or create security risks.
Contact thefingerprint by calling +44 (0)7740 348 521 or completing our contact form. We look forward to hearing from you.
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