Reflections on the new Quartz App
Today, Quartz announced a new app. I’ve been playing with it and it’s been extremely thought-provoking. Below are a few things that I think make it exceptional, reflecting on conversational apps as form-factor.
Before I jump in, here’s a quick description of the app: The Quartz App walks you through the latest 3–4 top news stories of the day in a conversational fashion as seen below: on the left is the beginning of a new story [below a native ad]. The two blue bubbles are prompts for responses: the only two actions available to me at that time in the app. Clicking “tell me more” led to the image on the right and some specious news about “Disneybounders.” Like other news digests, there is new content a few times a day.
There are 4 main things that I love about this app.
1. News as Conversation
The creators credit Lifeline for inspiring the app. In that game, the user guides the main character around via chat conversations. It’s a pleasurable return to the basic role-playing-game via app + push notifications. This combination of script-based conversation combined with the mobile phone form-factor have a psychological impact that I believe is hard for our minds to distinguish from someone human on other side. While passing the Turing test is one thing, another is just being good enough to momentarily trick our minds into half-belief — a much easier task with big rewards.
All of Quartz’s scripts and options are written by humans. Each story is in essence a limited tree of content with a fork at each stage. The only way to navigate outside of the fork-prompt (the blue boxes above) are links that are available within certain bubbles. It’s enough of a conversation to keep you engaged — particularly as the content is witty and supplemented by clever use of humanizing emoji and GIFs.
What is genius about this approach is that by limiting the choices available to the user, it reduces all cognitive load while humanizing the app. Similar to Yahoo News Digest it tries to make news simple but by making it a conversation, the app feels more intimate. It feels like a conversation with a friend that is telling you about the news of the day.
2. Permissions via conversations
The second interesting part of the Quartz App is that there is only one initial ask: Turn on Push Notifications. There is no simpler on-boarding than this — it’s basically frictionless and it makes sense: why would they need anything else for this app? There are no settings. There is no profile. There is nothing but the conversation.
What’s also interesting is how the push notification is requested: By making it a conversational format, the app is able to convince me to accept the notification while walking me through the details: “We can also send you notifications… Is that OK?” [options + response] “You’ll get a pop-up” [pop-up] “Thanks…” This is all made possible by the conversational nature of the app. I’d imagine this format leads to much higher opt-in rates.
3. Native ads
Even though this app is obviously a prescribed set of prompts, the conversational nature makes the ads feel special. This app is not a real person. It’s not a friend. But it’s humanized enough to trigger natural cognitive biases.
At the end of some amount of usage, the app prompts you to try out an ad (the MINI ad below). While my normal intuition is just to ignore the prompt, I couldn’t help but spend a few seconds debating clicking in... Why? What’s different about this ad?
Unlike a simple display ad, in a conversational relationship with my app I feel like I owe something to it: I want to click. At the most subconscious level I feel the need to reciprocate and not let the app down: “The app has given me this content. It’s been very nice so far and I enjoyed the GIFs. I should probably click since it’s asking nicely.”
I know this sounds crazy but there’s something to this. I’d love to see their CTRs…
4. The content ends
The last piece that I love about this app is that it ends. In total it takes about 2–3 minutes to review all the content available at a given time of day. The app thanks you for your time and you’re done. This is similar to other news digests but I think the conversational aspect, again, adds a layer that makes it more approachable.
The Quartz App announcement mentions Lark as an inspiration for the app: similar to an exercise coach/conversation app, the Quartz App acts as a news coach: I’m your friend, your guide; simple to use and quick. When you get a notification and tap it, it’ll only be a few minutes and you’ll probably have fun.
In a world of infinite scrolling this ritualized bite-sized conversation keeps you wanting more.
While this app seems like only the MVP of a clever Quartz experiment so far, it’s been a pleasure to use. It might fail, it might succeed — we’ll see.
One thing to reflect on is how Siri would perform as a text conversation bot rather than relying on voice. While Siri provides exponentially more options and powers than this app (and most conversation bots which are cousins to this type of app), the need to use voice makes it much more limited; Even though I could ask Siri almost anything, I usually ask her nothing. In certain situations voice is helpful (hands are busy and you really know your way around certain Siri commands) but in most others, voice is a limiting factor.
Conversational text apps and bots are undergoing a renaissance and rightfully so — there are so many subconscious responses that humanized conversations trigger it’s a surprise they haven’t been used more on mobile phones so far. There are so many new ways of interacting with content that we have yet to fully develop. Kudos to the Quartz team for throwing in another though-provoking app.
For more, see the article on “Futures of Text” (another listed inspiration for the Quartz App team). It dives much more into where this form-factor is headed.
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Thoughts? Comments? On Twitter: @gascasf
