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China’s State-Owned Xinhua News Agency Debuts “Composite Anchors”

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Are “Composite Anchors” the Future of Media

7 minute read

China’s state-owned Xinhua News Agency introduced so-called “composite anchors”, combining the images and voices of human anchors with artificial intelligence technology.

The new AI anchors, launched by Xinhua and Beijing-based search engine operator Sogou during the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, can deliver the news with “the same effect” as human anchors because the machine learning program is able to synthesise realistic-looking speech, lip movements and facial expressions, according to a Xinhua news report.

Read more at https://www.scmp.com/tech/innovation/article/2172235/xinhua-news-agency-debuts-ai-anchors-partnership-search-engine-sogou#CzOp4771QAU1cQYX.99

Creating an Engaging Digital Experience For Your Customers

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10 Steps to Creating an Engaging Digital Experience

5 min read

Read the full article on Entrepreneur.com

In order to be effective, websites need to be multifunctional in design. They need to be built like a house: protecting against the elements, providing a comfortable living space with ample storage, meeting basic needs, etc. Your website should be designed to improve user acquisition, lift engagement and help you retain customers.

It’s science and psychology combined with art. Your team should focus on several different elements to create an interactive experience that directly engages the target audience. Here are 10 steps to follow while refining the user’s online experience.

1. Focus on user types, not buyer personas

Buyer personas are primarily designed to align marketing messages and ad copy. To create the ideal user experience, you don’t need to know what “customer Lisa” specifically likes or what her pain points are. However, you do need to know the user types you’re targeting and how they browse and shop, which devices they use, and how they find and use your products. Create your experience around those user type segments rather than buyer personas.

2. Create simple experiences

Customers should feel engaged immediately. Keep your interface clean and simple and embrace white space. This invites them to explore your site on their own rather than forcing them to find what they’re looking for among cluttered designs with too many options vying for their attention.

3. Design like Fisher-Price

When you’re refining the user experience, aim for something that feels like you’re interacting with oversized Fisher-Price toys. This means creating large elements with simplified designs, clear copy that even a child could understand and actionable, concise directions (and calls-to-action).

This kind of experience works perfectly on any device, especially on mobile where larger elements make for easier navigation.

4. Design for limited real estate

Any time you’re creating a user experience, you should ask yourself if this is how you’d want it to function on mobile. How would it look on a smartphone versus a tablet? If you’re designing on a desktop, you have to carefully consider how it might translate in a mobile setting.

You can guarantee a better experience by designing for mobile users first, ensuring compatibility and a more engaging experience overall.

5. Don’t trust your feelings

Never assume that your user experience has reached perfection simply because you personally think it looks great and it did well when you put it through its paces in a test environment. How you or your team views the experience might be wildly different from a customer who sees it for the first time.

Always test the experience with outsiders. There are a number of services that test your user experience with actual consumers. Their comments, responses and activity are recorded during the interaction with your site and/or app so you can review feedback and make necessary changes.

6. Mix up your content

People are engaged in a variety of ways, and some respond better to certain types of content than others. Through testing, you can find the right balance between deeply engaging video or animations, images and written content on your product pages and blogs.

Continue to refine, diversify and test your content with audiences to see how variations in your content change engagement levels. You may discover that static images are less effective, but animation and live video win with your target audience.

7. Make the copy sing

You’d be hard-pressed to develop an engaging user experience that didn’t utilize copy in some way. Whether you use minimal copy or long-form content, you need to make sure it’s compelling and hooks the user to stay engaged.

Every word should serve a purpose by moving prospects through the experience toward a conversion.

8. Integrate social

Make it easy for your audience to promote products, contribute content (like reviews and thoughts) and interact with other customers within your funnel. Amazon does this through Q&A segments as well as comment sections. Social proof goes a long way toward improving engagement and conversions with prospective customers.

9. Personalize the experience

Make customers feel valuable by directly asking them for feedback while they’re on your site. Rather than slapping customers with an opt-in while they’re trying to leave, consider creating an exit intent survey that asks them to answer a couple short questions on the experience. Use these customer insights to further improve the UX of your site.

10. Offer customization

Customization in any form is a large part of personalizing the user experience to make it more engaging for each customer. This could involve allowing a user to customize the visual experience of the site (such as layout options and dashboard elements within an online community) to customizing the products they purchase. It allows the user to own their part of the experience with your brand, which will encourage them to return to “their space” in the future.

Web Design Tricks to Grow Your Business Exponentially

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An improved user experience will make your site more trustworthy.

7 min read

Read Full Article Here on Entreprenuer.com

With so many ongoing tasks, it can be far too easy to let a little thing like digital presence fall by the wayside. However, that would be a grave mistake.

The Harvard Business Review recently conducted a study on what exactly makes people want to complete a purchase from a particular website, and the results were a resounding “trustworthiness.” By making consumers feel safe, comfortable and at ease when they visit your online destination, you stand a much higher chance of not just encouraging them to complete a purchase, but convincing them to become longtime users.

A strong website design is paramount in creating this trustworthiness. By presenting an online destination that is straightforward and easy to navigate, users will have a more positive experience throughout your website, making them more likely to complete a purchase. 

So, while things like company transparency, great testimonials, and a solid product are obvious ways to ingrain familiarity to potential customers, website design clearly ranks particularly high when determining if a brand seems trustworthy or not.

In order to stand out from the crowd, there are a few tried-and-true design elements that will transform your website visitors into loyal customers. Don’t worry, I’m not going to say something obvious like “responsive designs” — elements like that are a given.

Related: 10 Steps to Creating an Engaging Digital Experience

Here are five top web design and UX trends that will grow your business fast.

1. Video landing page

Incorporating video into your website design is a no-brainer. I mean, 78 percent of internet users watch videos online every week. 

But, don’t just embed any old YouTube video. Instead, take your website design to the next level by creating a video landing page.

You could target this video to a direct call to action on a particular web page, a la Salesforce. Or you could take a page out of Baesman’s book and create an immersive video that auto-plays on your homepage. Either of these approaches can provide information or drive home the brand’s identity — but both will improve UX and users’ impression of your company as a whole.

Not sold? The proof is in the pudding. According to Vidyard and Demand Metric’s The State of Video Marketing 2017 study — which surveyed 159 B2B and B2C professionals and entrepreneurs — it is predicted that 69 percent of website traffic will be video, while 70 percent of professional participants reported that video converts better than other forms of information and content.

2. Parallax scrolling

While digital experiences have no doubt improved many aspects of our daily lives, it has had one negative impact: People are lazy. So lazy, in fact, that clicking a button is often too far out of the realm of possibility.

Enter parallax scrolling.

This uneven-like scrolling effect has combated consumers’ general laziness while remaining engaging and visually appealing. With a simple swipe (a la Tinder), users have easily consumed your information as they make their way down the page.

The popularity of parallax scrolling has also introduced more deep-scrolling and single-page website designs, and renders what information is “above the fold” a little less necessary, since it is easier to see what’s below, too. Ultimately, that makes prioritizing content easier for you to manage and increases your user’s likelihood of seeing everything anyways.

Make Your Money Matter took its parallax scrolling to the next level, with effects spanning an illustrated timeline that goes both horizontally and vertically, ensuring it captivates users.

3. Animated calls to action

Calls to action are a necessary evil in website design. The fact remains that your consumers won’t know what to do unless you explicitly tell them. Many. Many. Times.

However, simply telling your consumers what to do just isn’t enough anymore, either. They’re seeing stimuli and instructions from all corners of the web, so you need a little something extra to help your goal stand out.

Adding a little animation to your important action items might be just the ticket. Whether it’s a micro-mini interaction (such as “liking” a Facebook post and seeing the many reaction animations) or a simple effect to catch users’ eyes, consumers are more likely to execute the action you’re pushing when the call to action grabs their attention and provides confirmation of completion.

Need some inspiration? Airbnb uses its animation app, Lottie, to incorporate subtle graphics animations atop its calls to action throughout its website and app designs.

4. Custom typography

Every website needs text, but the days of boring Times New Roman, Arial or any other basic stock font have long-since passed. Instead, take your message to the next level with unique typography that encompasses your brand identity while simultaneously communicating to users.

This unique typography can take many shapes (literally) or be found in different areas of your design. Some brands may choose to utilize this in their logo design, while other businesses (like mine) will sprinkle custom font throughout the entire design to draw attention to important content, like this newsletter signup call to action (below). Ultimately, the choice in how and where you utilize this trend is up to you.

5. Artificial intelligence

Despite the surge in ecommerce sales over brick and mortar storefronts, people still crave connections, which is likely one of the reasons that artificial intelligence in all its forms is so popular.

AI in website design can take many shapes, but some popular examples include machine learning, personalization and chatbots. Machine learning and personalization are cut from the same cloth to a degree and ingratiate a feeling of “being special” with users that, in turn, fosters brand loyalty.

Chatbots influence user experience much more directly, though. While they provide an engaging element, the biggest draw to incorporating chatbots into your website design relates to customer service. Users can ask questions and receive answers in real time — which is easy to visualize — and acquire information quickly.

How Customers Decide to Buy from You – RE: Your Website

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Research: How Customers Decide Whether to Buy from Your Website

7 minute read

Read the full article on the Harvard Business Review

Sally’s finger hovered over the “Purchase” button. After hours of online sleuthing, she was pretty sure the green chair would complete her living room. It was the style and color she wanted, home delivery was guaranteed within three days, she had money in the bank to pay for it, and both the website and this particular chair appeared to be highly rated by customers. But Sally hesitated. Maybe she would take one more look at the local furniture outlet…

This fictional example is all too common. Global e-commerce sales exceeded $2 trillion in 2017, and are on pace to more than double by 2021. Yet average online conversion rates have remained doggedly low: Fewer than 4% of consumers arriving from desktop browsers buy, and the number is lower still for tablet and smartphone users (3% and 1%, respectively). These are a far cry from offline retail conversion rates, estimated to be 20%–40%.

Why do so few online shoppers convert to purchasers?

Consumer behavior research suggests that trust is essential to forming an intention to purchase. When trust is high, people are much more likely to take risks and engage in trade. In traditional business contexts, trust emerges and evolves in a physical space, and between two or more people interacting in person. But in the e-commerce setting, a prospective customer usually does not have any such contact, and so they must rely entirely on the digital experience. So, how exactly does consumer trust emerge online?

Researchers have tried to provide an exact answer to this question, one rooted in deliberative cognitive processes. They use decision models to describe sets of logical factors related to the formation of purchase intentions, such as an individual’s preexisting disposition to trust (it turns out that some people are naturally more trusting than others) or a website’s structural assurances (such as indicators of strong encryption and security, privacy policies, and return guarantees). Deliberative processes assume strong causal relationships, hard constraints, and that people expend explicit cognitive effort as they make their trust assessments.

While the notion of deliberative models is appealing, it does not explain research showing that many visitors ignore “hard” factors such as privacy and security policies, while being influenced by seemingly insignificant factors such as font styles and colors. Thus we were curious: Is it possible that online consumers also rely on less deliberative, “fuzzy,” instinctual processes, such as those commonly used in interpersonal trust situations? Could it be that online shoppers actually commit very little explicit cognitive effort when making the decision about whether to trust a website?

Such a view is consistent with the work of Steven Sloman, a cognitive psychologist who argued that people are “parallel processors” who utilize two complementary reasoning systems. One system of reasoning is deliberative, rooted in symbolic structures, rules, and established patterns of logic (think algebra). The other system is associative: diffuse, approximate, and nondeliberative, based more on personal experience and intuition than on formal rules. The associative system is not irrational per se, but it may not be consistent with formal rational logic.

Our study explores two hypotheses. First, we expected that when evaluating whether to trust a website while making low-risk decisions, consumers tend to rely on deliberative and explicitly logical reasoning processes. However, our second hypothesis was that when faced with higher-risk decisions, online consumers are more likely to turn to associative (intuitive) reasoning processes. Our reasoning was that trust matters more for bigger, riskier decisions — and prior research suggests that intuitive reasoning is a critical component of trusting someone.

To explore the hypotheses, we designed a laboratory experiment in which 245 research subjects were asked to visit the website of a genuine 17-year-old Australian bookstore that was unfamiliar to them, and then to make some purchase decisions. Subjects were randomly split into six groups, each exposed to different experimental conditions. Some subjects were presented with the authentic website, while others were exposed to a crippled version that lacked key pieces of information (for example, e-commerce security certificates and product return policies). Some were told that they would be asked to explain their decision reasoning — a technique designed to explicitly trigger their deliberative/logical thinking processes — whereas others were asked to complete a task designed to lead them to rely on their intuitive reasoning system. Finally, all subjects made two decisions: (1) whether they would purchase a book — a hypothetical, zero-risk decision with no real-world impacts, and (2) whether they would provide personal information such as their name, phone number, and home address in order to receive a $20 gift — a higher-risk decision because it had real-world outcomes.

A longitudinal logistic regression analysis was conducted to fully understand the trust differences across these six groups, and this revealed two major findings. First, when faced with the hypothetical, zero-risk decision, our subjects relied on deliberative (rule-based, logical, rational) processes. Second, when faced with an actual, and therefore riskier, decision, many of our online shopping subjects turned to associative (intuitive, diffuse, approximate) processes.

The message from our study is clear: When making decisions involving risk, such as an online purchase from a website, consumers tend to rely more on intuition than on deliberation. This is important because it challenges the established deliberative perspectives of consumer trust formation and offers an explanation as to why things like aesthetics, professionalism, and other implicit clues matter for building online trust.

Understanding that online consumers do not always engage deliberative processes, but often rely on intuition — especially when making higher-risk decisions — has profound implications for redesigning online consumer experiences. “Simple” changes (such as page layouts and choices of fonts, images, and colors) may be far more critical to associative trust-formation processes than we previously understood. Our findings suggest that what seem like merely aesthetic design choices may actually be the way your customers learn to trust you (or don’t). And that will influence whether they decide to make a purchase.