This was one of the main questions we came up while researching for our bachelor thesis “Storytelling versus Messaging”, which will be done by the end of July. But since we think our findings in the theoretical part might be also of interest for others, we want to share a few in the following post.
We are Felix and Max, two communication design students from Berlin with a focus on interface design and digital publishing. We previously worked together on BRUT Magazine 3 with a bunch of fellow students.
Why Chatbot “Bubble”
A lot of guys are talking about bots and conversational journalism at the moment and we see the rise of chatbots in almost every corner of the internet. So we agree with Martin Hoffmann who stated, that we are at the beginning of a hypecycle:
“I think we are facing the beginning of a Gartner hypecycle: With every new technology, the expectations are huge in the first place and afterwards there’s a big disillusion and the curve is falling. But after a while, the curve is rising again till it reaches a productive plateau.” (Martin Hoffmann)
Even before Facebook’s F8 conference and the recent hype about chatbots and conversational journalism started, we were wondering about how it would feel, being in a WhatsApp group together with some of Goethe’s main characters: Faust, Mephisto and Gretchen.
Our reference were our own private groupchats with friends — quite often after several beers in the middle of the night. Why shouldn’t it be possible to use messaging meta-data (join/leave group, date, time, use of emojis, …) also for the purpose of storytelling?
Our method
Beside looking at dozens of Medium articles we did a little research on the existing chatbots to get an overview of the range of products on the market. We also did some interviews with experts (Martin Hoffmann, Luke Atcheson and Scott Savarie) that were really helpful. Thanks for that again!
In the following we want to dive more deep into three of our hypotheses and what we found out in our research.
The future of storytelling is inside the chat window.
At the moment, that’s partly true because the chat window is just one out of many channels where storytelling takes place. But if instant messaging is continuing to grow, the chat window might soon be the biggest channel for storytelling.
In the last years, a lot of websites got replaced by social media profiles. Especially in the cultural and entertainment field it’s very common that websites have some kind of a hub function, gathering the content of several social media channels. Right now, we can witness another shift from social media platforms towards instant messaging apps. If this current shift continues and messaging will finally overtake the social media platforms, what will be the effect of our profiles?
Sure, bots won’t replace Apps, but if our inbox gets the new homescreen it might be also useful to build bots which are running on an minimum of interactions like newsletters in our mailbox or news apps on our homescreen.
As our survey on existing bots has shown, there is still a lack of journalistic or literary content when it comes to bots. But products like Quartz, Lifeline or even Humani shows, that there is a huge potential in the future of storytelling inside conversational UIs.
Novel, movie, … chatbot?
Lots of movies just adopt already existing novels. So sometimes the movies are much more successful then the original book. Maybe chatbots or “stories inside the conversational UI” have a similar potential because they can use even these different and new levels of storytelling we mentioned in our article’s intro.
At the moment, it’s mostly a linear communication between one single chatbot and a human. The human is giving the bot tasks which it tries to understand and give feedback. Why is there no possibility of communicating with several bots? Also considering the fact, that group chats are way more fun than one-to-one communication.
(By the way we are currently searching for the technical solution for this problem. Do you have an idea? Don’t hesitate to help us.)
For example: Imagine you are in a chat group with a serious news bot and a funny sport bot. And these two are not only communicating with you but also with each other. And wouldn’t it be cool if these bots could realize the right time for giving you a political update or supply you with some sport news?
We want to experiment with these ideas. Not only in that storytelling perspective but also as designers. While we are at it:
The role of designers
As we said in the beginning, we thought a lot about our task in that business. In general we don’t think that communication design and interface designers have to fear for their jobs. The range of digital devices and their interfaces is too widespread for that point zero.
Maybe it might mean less time in Sketch or Photoshop but it doesn’t mean less time thinking about a solution. (Scott Savarie)
But when it comes to conversational user interfaces, their influence on the content and their conceptual tasks will grow in the future because companies need to find a way of transferring their value of brand recognition into this new medium.
That’s where our tasks for the next two months are: We want to bring good storytelling to the chat window and therefor learn what it means for communication design, interface design and digital storytelling in the future.
P.S. Big up to Max who was fighting with our English. Thank you!
