Why text when you can tap?
When Slack invited us to their Message Button program, we were extremely excited. Buttons had multiple advantages over plain text in a variety of ways: they didn’t require complex NLP to parse intent, button interaction was familiar enough for users to pick up instantly and most of all, it reduces cognitive overload.
What is cognitive overload?
Cognitive load refers to the amount of mental effort in order to get something done. Cognitive overload then, is when there are too many steps or too much to remember that nothing gets done. For instance, remembering birthdays and events. Instead of keeping it in your head, we have calendars to remind us. These calendars act as supports to prevent cognitive overload.
We’re in the early days of conversational UI, and right now a lot of stuff that’s coming out looks a lot like command line (we’re guilty of this too).
It’s less apparent with early tech adopters already familiar with programming lingo, but it matters a lot to everyday non-technical users who find the process of learning these command lines an obstacle.
This is where adoption cliff happens: users install a bot out of curiosity, realize that using it requires a whole lot of memorization and give up.
Simplified decision making
At Kip, our goal is to help office assistants and admins have a better experience when shopping for the team.
Our first step, which was providing 3 best match results instead of overwhelming choices to the user, got us halfway there. With buttons, not only was decision making easier but also faster and much more pleasant to use. Complex interactions like “option 1 but cheaper” was integrated directly into the message card.
Users didn’t have to scroll up or recall the specific commands to search for similar items or add things to cart.
Messaging buttons brought us even closer to helping office assistants and admins save time and simplify decision making. By interacting directly with the product, they could focus quickly and get it done faster.
This was great, but we wondered — could we make it even better?
A Messaging Button for ‘Home’
One of the biggest challenges our users had was remembering specific commands for different conversation contexts. This was a big problem with our core demographic: admins, assistants and managers.
Most of the time, they were already overworked with limited support, and having to remember specific command lines for Kip was too much. It was a cognitive overload x 100000.
When you browse a website or app, there’s normally a hamburger menu, bottom tabs or some kind of directory to navigate around. You don’t have to remember as much, because you can always hit ‘back’ or ‘home’. In a conversation UI, you’re constrained and limited by the messages you can send back to the user. There is no menu.
After much trial-error and user feedback, we came up with a “Home” button. It’s a very simple idea. At the bottom of each Kip message, we have a penguin emoji button that persists. When you tap on it, it opens up a set of admin choices: view cart, settings, members and back.
There are 2 main benefits to creating a Kip-home button:
- No more cognitive overload. Instead of remembering command-lines, users can just tap a button to get work done.
- Accessibility. Having a button persist across all messages meant that users could change preferences anytime during any part of the conversation WITHOUT having to scroll up, sit through on-boarding or remember specific superuser commands.
It’s been great fun working together with Slack and developing for messaging buttons. There are too many people to thank for this giant project, but special shoutouts to: Amir, Ceci, Danielle, Don, Tina, Jassim for giving us feedback and providing support. We can’t wait to see what new developments happen next, and what’s in store for bots and conversational UI!
Kip is an AI penguin for Group Shopping. Try Kip for Slack by tapping the button below:
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