Just chatting: is Slack the interface of the future?

It’s all about getting away from the touchscreen, and interfacing with the devices around us in more natural ways: haptics, computer vision, voice control, and artificial intelligence — What is Zero UI?

Dialogue

Interacting in a more natural way with our technology is, for me, a bit of a misnomer. I can’t think of anything in nature that I can control with my voice or by gesturing. (Unless you happen to be called Moses.)

Pulling levers, pushing buttons and twisting dials have, over the last hundred years, become naturalised ways to interact with machinery and objects.

What started as mechanisms for control have developed into signifiers which give us instant feedback when we can’t see the inner workings of a device — we know the amplifier will be loud because we’ve turned the volume control to eleven. And, skeumorphic or not, we use the same signifiers in our digital interfaces.

This is largely because our digital interfaces have still been for dumb machines. As sophisticated as some of our tools and devices are, they are still not ‘artifically intelligent’. They haven’t passed the Turing test. They react to instruction.

Zero UI isn’t needed for these dumb machines.

Take the example of a TV. It is much more effort to say to my TV, ‘change channel up’, than it is to press a button with an up arrow. This interaction needs a physical interface. Simple, but necessary.

But for the TV to find me something to watch that I’ll enjoy — a task which requires intelligence — this opens up a dialogue with the TV just as it would if you asked a friend to recommend you a restaurant, and would require a more sophisticated input and response mechanism than a single button.

Zero UI’s challenge is to be invisible when we don’t need it, but quick to access when we do. And there is a certain breed of app which is beginning to explore this tension.

Chat

Instant messaging has become a natural way for humans to communicate.

Four of the six top social networks are messaging apps (Jan 2015). WhatsApp has 800 million monthly active users (July 2015). Team chat app Slack has 500,000 daily active users and a valuation over $1bn (Jan 2015).

Many messaging apps are now trying to figure out ways to monetize. Some are using ads, sent to users as chat messages. You can send money via Facebook Messenger. China’s WeChat lets you shop and hail a taxi.

In this great article, Scott Belsky paints a picture of the interface layer, citing Uber as a great example.

A new cohort of design-driven companies are adding a layer of convenience between us and the underlying services and utilities that improve our lives

Chat apps are starting to compete in this layer and could even create a new layer above it. You can already hail a taxi from WeChat, how long before you can book an Uber from Slack?

Slack

I deliberately singled out Slack in my title, and not just for clickbait (Slack is so hot right now). Teams using Slack use Slack a lot. Those 500,000 daily users, they’re sending 300 million messages a month. So it makes sense that Slack allows so many integrations with other apps, as well as custom integrations, making it the best example of a chat app as an interface layer.

These integrations can be made to feel completely natural. A service can respond to a command or be addressed just as you would another user. You can easily seperate out ‘dumb machine’ tasks and ‘intelligent response’ tasks.

To my earlier point about dialogue with services, Slack’s onboarding journey is presented as a dialogue between the user and the service. Although it does tell you upfront that it’s not that intelligent.

Take Wunderlist for example, you can create to-dos and mark them as complete right from your Slack message box. No need to switch out of your chat window and into another interface.

At the rate Slack is growing, and the sophistication of its integrations, Slack might soon become the only way users interact with some of these services.

Here’s another example. I recently built wawawo [where are we, what are we working on] as a side project to help our team keep track of what projects are going on across our three offices. It’s getting some good use, but there are a couple of issues. First, people keep forgetting their password. Second, it’s another information point people have to remember to visit, not part of their natural workflow.

So one evening I created a couple of webhooks and slash commands on Slack and now people can query wawawo right from their chat.

Future

Users are comfortable communicating with each other through chat and it’s where they’re spending they’re time. It isn’t a step change for them to become used to engaging in dialogue with intelligent services. Slack is well positioned to pioneer further integrations with business services like travel booking and banking and internet of things devices for controlling offices. From this strong foothold in business it wouldn’t be a big move into personal messaging to compete in the interface layer.

We might not see Zero UI. But we might well see fewer UIs.