UI/UX plays a significant role in any brand’s success. It can help you reach new heights but only if you deliver a good service. This article takes you through the latest UI/UX trends and its benefits to help you understand it better.

What is the difference between UX and UI design

Both mobiles and desktops have a majority of digital users onboard and both the platforms have their own significance. For instance, desktops serve the purpose of quick access to web pages and mobile phones are ideal for creating engagement. Aesthetic graphics and engaging content must be on point while designing a digital presence but another important thing that most of the designers overlook is good user experience and interface. But what exactly is UI and UX?

What is UX?

UX is the abbreviated form of User Experience and it is based on the idea of creating a system that provides the users with the best experience. It aims at turning your customers into loyal customers by offering a positive experience to them. UX is accountable for a user’s journey through the mobile app or website which eventually becomes the deciding factor for the success of the business.

What is UI?

UI is an abbreviation used for User Interface and it’s the way using which users can interact with any mobile application. User interface design for mobile applications focuses on delivering easy, enjoyable and effective interactions between users and the application. In IT, User Interface refers to any device that allows the users to interact with monitors, screens or mobile devices. The primary goal which UI aims for is to provide the best interaction possible.

What are benefits of UX/UI

1. Encourages the use of interaction: Creating content is not a hard task. But creating content that people would like to interact with, is the real challenge. Be it in the form of text, images, advertisements, or call to action, everything must lure the user. There are several techniques to encourage user interaction such as producing the content that appeals to the targeted audience. It can also be about personalised features based on consumer behaviour or things they like. People prefer a software that has consistency in design, is predictable, and comfortable to use.

2. Generates loyalty: A good user experience can create customer loyalty for your brand. An application or website that offers easy functionality and backed by great service will make your users use it again and again. The designer can create a Customer Journey i.e. CJM Map to achieve it. It will help the designer to map the entire journey of the user through the website or the mobile application. This journey must be thoroughly tested to make sure that a user’s interaction with the product is as smooth and easy as possible. It’s more like putting the design team in the shoes of the user and thinking from their perspective.

3. Generates recommendations: An interactive user experience design is the key to encouraging word of mouth recommendations i.e. it should be good to an extent that the users can’t stop talking about it. A well-designed site or application with the ease of use, offering great features and usefulness will encourage people to tell others about the service. A part of user experience is meant to make sharing easy and a free recommendation from a user itself is way more impactful than a paid advertisement.

4. Reduces development costs: A stellar user experience helps you keep a project within budget by lowering development costs along with extensive user research, prototyping, and usability testing. By doing this, you can ensure that development time is targeted on the areas of functionality that matter. This focused approach helps you create better initial design specs, reduces the risk of feature creep, and provides more relevant content. It greatly erases the need for last-minute redesigns and enhancements.

5. Reduces internal costs: User experience is an end-user focused approach that concentrates on the design and development, keeping in mind what users want and not what developers think they want. It not only saves money on development costs but it also helps businesses to wisely use their internal resources. For instance, the design will help you identify the products liked or wanted by people. This would help the sales and marketing department to put their efforts on profitable products instead of putting it on the less profitable ones. Moreover, it reduces the need for manual intervention and hence reduces the support costs eventually.

What are latest UX/UI trends

1. Animation: It makes web pages or mobile applications more appealing to users as it connects with the customers more than any other design. This tool is getting popular amongst the designers as it allows them to create a positive impact on the users. Earlier, we used to have flat logos, icons, buttons, etc. but now they are getting replaced with animated buttons, icons, and even logos.

2. Digital illustrations for the web: Custom digital illustrations are trending in the field of UI and UX. These digital illustrations are generally used on web interfaces and add colours, designs while making the information more evident and interesting. They are widely used by blogs and service websites to beautify their website and present sober information in a modern and fancy way.

3. 3D designs: It helps you create more impactful design and it’s already being used in many games and movies with high functionality. A combination of animation and 3D is going to be the next trend in UI and UX.

4. Split Screen: The idea of using two screens simultaneously appeals to a lot of users. It not only looks cool but also allows you to gather more information at the same time.
5. Voice UI: Voice assistants like Google Home and Alexa have taken over the entire digital world of virtual assistants. People use these services widely to get most of their work done irrespective of its origin i.e. small or big. Performing tasks using your voice is a lot more convenient than operating a device with buttons and making it do the same.

NDN Group build a chatbot with personality for hotel group

At NDN Group, we help our clients map out UX/UI to understand their customers, define customer experience journeys and innovate with a strong focus on customers’ needs and awe-inspiring insights about them. From user personas and customer journeys to content strategy, wireframe to website and app design, we help our business clients tell their stories and engage with customers for scaling businesses.

NDN Group’s digital consultancy, New Digital Noise, has been helping a global hotel group to develop an AI-powered chatbot with persona and personality traits, thereby creating immersive and fascinating experiences to its customers. The bot can help guests make suite booking and restaurant reservations as well answer questions on thrilling entertainment and hotel facilities.

To create persona and personality for the bot, our team has gathered insights to understand more about the hotel group from its brand persona, daily operations, gaming and entertainment facilities, world-class dining experience and luxurious and bespoke services offered to customers.

Creating a chatbot conversation flow and putting to the test

Our UX/UI team has arranged empathy sessions for the hotel to learn their customers genuine needs. With our five-stage process – Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test, we empathise with the targeted customers through researches, interviews and sharing. We understand customers’ emotional needs, discover human touchpoints and garner insights on the needs of customers in different segments. Our team has created solid solutions to address users’ needs and built a prototype chatbot for testing/validation to excel to entire UX process.

Also, we have embraced six core human needs – Certainly, Variety, Significance, Love, Growth and Contribution – in the process. Then we have clearly defined the background, personalities, tone of voice and manner of the bot.

In the development of the chatbot script, we imagine how the AI-powered chatbot talks to customers based on its persona.  Based on conversational diagram, we have imagined the bot talking to customers in real time when writing scripts. We listened to characters or people who are similar to the bot persona. We try to avoid dead ends and leaving the user hanging. It mimics what we would hear from a concierge in the luxurious hotel. Finally, we have developed a prototype for the chatbot and fine-tuned scripts. We have interacted with the bot to excel its dialogue flow and make it immersive to customers, ensuring that the bot is helpful and meet customers’ needs and expectations.

Conclusion

Our User Experience/User Interface design services are thoughtful, engaging, user–centric. We work with our clients to define their business goals, and every industry is different. The trends of UX and UI have changed a lot and it will continue to do so. But one thing which doesn’t change with time is the quality of UX and UI. To derive better results and satisfy your customers, it is important to offer them an outstanding UX/UI services. Drop us a line at info@ndngroup.com to learn more about how our UX/UI services fit your business needs.

Frustrated customers who don’t get quick answers may leave website and never return. Chatbots can eliminate that scenario and help you keep your customers.

Increase Customer Base

There is another benefit of using chatbots in business. They may help enterprises reach more people which can increase your customer base.

Since chatbots can be used in many applications, enterprises can take advantage of that to help businesses grow. Chatbots can answer multiple questions at the same time as well.

Streamline Procedures and Automation

Other benefits of using chatbots in business are that they help businesses streamline procedures and automation. When used on website they can provide fast, automated answers to most questions. Their use prevents customers from waiting a day or longer to receive responses as they would have in the past. This enables business to serve greater numbers of people while saving costs.

NDN Group and Mobinology’s chatbot service and solution

NDN Group and Mobinology, world-class business software developer, has forged global partnership to deliver enterprise-grade chatbot solution to empower enterprises to accelerate business growth. Powered by leading artificial intelligence and cloud computing technologies, the industry-leading and end-to-end chatbot solution enables global and regional enterprises with secure, scalable and agile operations, combined with machine learning and data analytics capabilities. The all-in-one chatbot solution defines new pathways for enterprises to deliver seamless and personalized customer experience.

NDN Group and Mobinology’s intelligent chatbot offers distinctive capabilities at scale. We design immersive dialogue flow to chart out extraordinary dialogue and conversational flow to create high-impact and personalised customer experience. We also curate tone of voice and manner to reflect enterprises’ branding for creating maximum customer engagement and loyalty, and bot personality and persona to interact with users and immerse them in conversational journey.

The self-intelligent bot learns from the inputs it experiences and garners deep understanding on the intent behind customer requests as well as provide smart answers. Also, the bot augments the importance of Big Data through their automated data collection that enables enterprises to conduct in-depth analysis on the conversational journey and understand end-user behaviour. The Natural Language Processing (NLP) powers all forms of language recognition including Cantonese and switch languages to enable enterprises extend global reach.

The bot uses their wealth of knowledge to provide comprehensive answers to queries. It is also specially designed to parse documents, crawl website content and convert into rule-defined structure data. It is empowered to use real-time information for accelerating revenue opportunities automatically after conversation with customers.

Types of chatbots

Depending on how the specific bots were programmed, we can divide them into two large groups: working according to pre-prepared commands – simple chatbot and AI-powered chatbot.

Simple chatbots work based on pre-written keywords that they understand. Each of these commands must be written by the developer separately using regular expressions or other forms of string analysis.

Smart chatbots rely on artificial intelligence when they communicate with users. Instead of pre-prepared answers, the robot responds with adequate suggestions on the topic. In addition, all the words said by the customers are recorded for later processing.

Many business owners are beginning to understand what benefits chatbots can bring to them. This technology is still in an early stage, its capabilities continue increasing and the best chatbots have yet to be created. Invest in building a chatbot for your business and be at the forefront of innovation.

Enquires on NDN Group and Mobinology’s chatbot solution:

NDN Group email: info@ndngroup.com 

Mobinology email: info@mobinology.com 

Facebook is extending the Click-to-Messenger ads to Instagram, which re-direct users to Messenger interactions. First introduced on Facebook last year, the feature help to channel Instagrammers’ interests into an active conversation with businesses. Target audience will first be directed to a preset Messenger content, whether they are images, videos or carousel ads.

Messenger now boasts more than 1.2 billion monthly users. This new business placement on Instagram can surely help to build action-oriented experiences. Businesses can also place the ads on both Facebook and Instagram to extend their reach.

This year, global businesses are looking forward to develop innovative marketing strategies for the coming year and multiply the number of clients while giving a boost to their sales figures.

It’s the best time for marketers to review the best B2B digital marketing strategies and tactics that could be used in next year and assess their approaches against other businesses in the sector. While marketing strategies for B2C sector can be quite simple, but for the marketers involved in the B2B sector, there are some particularly pressing issues which make marketing quite difficult.

A good starting point for reviewing the best digital marketing strategies and tactics that will make a positive impact next year is to think through innovation across all marketing channels. Here in the article, I’d like to demonstrate some of the most result-oriented business to business digital marketing strategies for 2017 to give you the biggest uplift on business the coming year.

Marketing Automation is one of the most preferred strategies by the global B2B marketing companies and stands atop the B2B digital marketing strategies. It provides an automated way of scoring and nurturing leads with appealing and attractive content along the journey to purchase. The strategy has been a great support for the global businesses to bring more sales and attract more visitors, however we came to know that not many businesses are fully exploiting marketing automation since they are at an early level of maturity. However, it’s going to be a great success in the coming year.

This has been used in B2B marketing campaigns for many years and is likely to gain more progress and success in the coming year as well. Over the past many years, readers of digital content have voted for the importance of content marketing amongst the marketing activities available. The success of content marketing lies upon the perfect balance of content quality, frequency and its quality of course. Remember that its future depends on shorter content and less content. Shorter and appealing content can be more effective in business-to-business blog posts.

There’s a reason that website personalisation has made its way to this countdown. This is a well-established technique for ecommerce websites, but traditionally has been less widely used within business-to-business marketing campaigns.

Also known as ABM, Account Based Marketing is an established approach in B2B marketing, particularly within larger organisations that have structures and processes to target key accounts.

Earlier, ABM was one of the digital marketing strategies and tactics which was poorly supported by most Marketing Automation services which focus on individual customer records.

Well, I don’t think I need to explain the important the tiny devices that are able to perform biggest tasks in our lives. Shift to the mobile is a key trend for B2B marketers. Because Google tells us that most businesses have responsive site, so it’s clear that mobile marketing brings great opportunities to almost every type of business. It’s no secret that Mobile Marketing is going to be a great success in year 2017.

With millions of people currently active on leading social media platforms, it’s no longer a secret that social media marketing has been a great technique for the B2B marketing and is going to gain more success in the future as well. Researchers show that B2B businesses tend to get the best results from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Youtube and Slideshare also stand out as particularly effective. If you want to grow your business in China, WeChat marketing is definitely an option you can’t miss.

Smart robots were once science fiction, but artificial intelligence (AI) is now turning into real strategy for B2B marketing that most digital marketers are utilizing. For example, chatbots on Facebook have helped the tech industry better serve customers without the assistance of an actual human being. Incorporating artificial intelligence can help brands a greater number of customers without expending costs on customer service.

With countless separate digital marketing channels available, there is a tendency of marketers to focus on individual channels, but an integrated nurturing process can reap dividends. One of the leading trends for successful B2B marketing campaign is the integration of different channels.

Ever wondered how many of your consumers that are actually looking (and responding) to your advertisements? If your answer is not many, then it’s the time that should start considering changing your strategy and implementing native advertising. It has been around for a while and while the concept isn’t new, expect to see them in abundance in 2017.

Regardless of your thoughts on the highly advanced Apple Watch and its usefulness, wearable technology is gaining traction. However, it’s not too late to start thinking for digital marketers to consider about how wearables can benefit their brand. Make it a part of your B2B digital marketing strategies and you’re ready to explore the benefits without having to worry about the failure.

It’s one thing going abroad for the first time, but coming from a third world country where I’ve lived for more than 20 years, really adds to the effect. I live in a city that’s quite close to the tribal region – a place devoid of the rule of law. Being a Pashtun, it’s even harder to break through the barriers of a culture of dogmatism and fanaticism.Basically, considering my background, doing an internship in Hong Kong was a huge step forward for me.

I have been in Hong Kong for about one week now, and the experience so far has been nothing short of amazing.To simply see the level of development in this part of the world is an outstanding experience unto itself. I was thrilled to say the least. I was especially fascinated by the extent of the organization and discipline that the people here have.

The first few days were a bit tough in terms of commuting to my workplace. My flatmate, Colin, who hails from the USA, showed me around the MTR (the train system) a few times on a Sunday. It was only after him showing me that I was able to find my way on my own. Now I love the MTR and they are actually pretty straightforward. Speaking from sheer personal experience, I believe that the MTR is the best way to get around in Hong Kong, in comparison to buses. The trains are exceptionally organized and always arrive/leave on time.

Once you get to know your way around your home, the MTR stations and which “exits” you need to take, then you’re good to go. You can always find your way to the nearest MTR then, if you get lost. MTR stations in Hong Kong have no shortage of signs in English. This is immensely helpful, especially if it’s your first time. On that note, never ever take cabs, unless you’re really lost, because they cost a LOT of cash. I, at least, try to avoid them exclusively.

The company I’m interning at is called New Digital Noise and it specializes in Digital Marketing. New Digital Noise provides services like social media, UX/UI, online advertising, content marketing and much more to their clients. The parent company is simply called NDN, which has other branches as well, including Klarity, HotMedia, Darizi and a few others.

he work that I’m doing is slightly different to marketing, it’s mostly technical. I’m working on developing chatbots for the Facebook Messenger platform, which is a brand new initiative. I say ‘slightly different’ because, even though the work I’m doing is on the technical side, chatbots are actually really useful for marketing.

The company office environment is really cool and the days start at 10AM and end at 7PM. There are three other interns in the company who are closely collaborating with me on the non-technical side. One of the interns, Vanessa, is also part of The Intern Group. Our supervisor, Gerardo, comes from a business background with prior work experience in quite a few big companies, including Google. He is quite young and amazingly friendly. He works in the position of Growth Hacker. I especially admire his knowledge, enthusiasm and devotion to learning.He is doing a great job of acclimatizing me to this new city and teaching me about the cultural differences.Basically, he’s the best boss I could ever have asked for, really.

This is the company by the way:

To talk about the challenges I’ve faced so far, I’ll admit that it’s a little tough communicating with people here. There is a language barrier, as many of the locals, especially the elderly, don’t speak much English. Most of the small eateries in my neighborhood (Hung Hom) have their menus all in Chinese. This is a bit tricky since 90% of the dishes are new to me, so the pictures only help to an extent. Sometimes even the Google Translate app doesn’t help, as it translates to Mandarin by default and the language spoken here is Cantonese. Even so, you can still find lot of people with a good level of English in Hong Kong. Despite the language barrier, everybody is really friendly and eager to help you out as much they can.

Last week on the 15th September, it was the Mid-Autumn Festival. I was so excited to see the dragon things (I honestly had no idea what they’d be like). So far, I’ve only been to LKF, and the experience was great. You can find lots of foreigners there, and I would definitely recommend that everyone should visit it once. One other place I’ve been to is the IFC (International Finance Center) mall. TIG will probably be arranging a couple of trips soon. So, fingers crossed!

In conclusion, I would like to say that I’m really fortunate to have got such a wonderful opportunity, to experience a country as developed as Hong Kong. I’m thoroughly grateful. It’s sort of a breakthrough for me in the sense that I would never have experienced or learned the things which have helped me grow immensely personality-wise, had I not come to this city. So for this, thank you TIG.

About the Hassan

Hassan is the TIG 2016 scholarship winner in Hong Kong. He is a student of Computer Science from Pakistan, currently in his last year of his Bachelor’s degree. He has a huge passion for programming, which he’s been doing since he was 12. He occasionally works as a freelancer and has built websites for clients all over the world. He loves to learn the latest cool technologies in the webosphere. His current objective is to learn Laravel, AngularJS and Python. Hassan is deeply interested in the study of anthropology, social psychology, history of civilizations, and to a lesser extent, philosophy. He loves watching movies, and is enamored with Asian cinema, especially Korean. He has so far watched a dozen of Korean dramas, a fact which consequently enticed him to learn the Korean language. Hassan’s name written in Hangul is 핫산 아흐마드 

(Originally posted on theInternGroup.com.)

At NDN Group, we are constantly experimenting with new technologies. So, when Facebook announced the launch of the “Chatbots for Messenger”, we decided to build one on own! There was just one problem, what would our bot do?

I mean, if you are a magazine… your bot can show articles. If you are an airline… your bot can help your passengers check-in. But if you are an agency… what is the bot supposed to do?

… and then it hit us!

A few days later, we would be hosting the “NDN Academy” a 4 days digital marketing Bootcamp for the top marketing professionals in Hong Kong. What if we could create a chatbot to interact with them? So, that is what we did!

As any good experience, the first part of the journey should be training the user. So we prepared our bot to show short “icebreakers”, in order to engage the user to continue.

In case the user couldn’t come up with anything to ask, we prepared three alternatives in the menu below: “Who are the speakers?”, “What are the 6 Mega Trend?” & “Surprise me!”.

If the user asked “Who are the speakers?”. The bot then introduced them shortly with a picture. Here is only one example of our many speakers:

If the user asked: “What are the 6 Mega Trend?”, the bot tricked them into being curious about the topic. The answer was never the same!

Cool functions, right? But those were just the fundamentals. By making use of the right infrastructure, our bot was prepared to ask question during the talks, do surveys, , collect results and even see analytics on how many people had the chatbot activate. This and many other features of chatbot building,  were only available to the administrators:

In short, it was an amazing medium to engage our audience. Of course, this is only one of many “use cases”. If you want to find out more about how chatbots can improve your organization, we are the first chatbot building company in Hong Kong!

Like this article? Read “How Bots are taking over Business!” to learn more about the chatbot benefits and uses.

Earlier this month, Facebook surprised us all with the launch of a hotly anticipated feature, Chatbots for Messenger. Since then, the real benefits of this technology has been widely discussed. Can bots replace us? What are they good for? Will bots change the way businesses interact with their customers? If yes, when?

Let’s start with the basics. Bots are nothing new! It’s been over 50 years since the first “bot” (called ELIZA) was created at MIT. Since then, bots have been used time and time again by companies, governments, and even online spammers to facilitate the communication between human and machines.

What changed?

There are two major reason for this sudden rise of the bot:

1) As cloud computing and machine learning improved, artificial intelligence became way better. To an extent, it has now become extremely difficult to differentiate between a person and machine.

2) Facebook and other messaging Apps (Telegram, Slack, etc.) has allowed this technology to reach ever greater audiences, and become massively adopted.

Too good to be true?

Because of these, the idea of bots is becoming extremely attractive to companies. Imagine being able to provide the fastest and most effective customer support, simultaneously to thousands of clients around the world, in any language, without employing a single representative. Furthermore, bots would be able to adapt to the specific individual and be aware of the entire purchase history. They will not require any training whatsoever, or vacations. Bots will be able to operate during off-hours. Always available, always prepared, always reliable.

What is more, now with Facebook, you can get an immediate audience of 900 million people, just by being there. Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it?

Here is the catch!

Building a chatbot requires a combination of psychological and technical expertises. Brands will require the right digital partners to develop and expand these platforms.

It’s not an easy road, but the ones who succeed will make it big! So, there you have it: reach your audience directly, disrupt your customer’s sales and support channels, get better understanding of your customers with analytics, and get noticed by being one of the first brands to use this medium. What are you waiting for?

If you wish to hear more about the hundreds of “use cases” for chatbots in the workplace or to connect with your clients, do not hesitate to contact us to learn more about chatbots. Technology is important, but relationships are what makes it possible for brands to be successful in the long-term.

If you like this article, we recommend “How we built our own Chatbot and why!”