The conversational user experience
Humans are quite social creatures, as the last 10 (thousand) years prove. We like to engage in discussions, debates, conversations and arguments. This apparently simple method of communication is catching on more and more in our digital ecosystem.
Live chats
The live chat is — at its core — a one-on-one experience, with different levels of complexity but usually adhering to a simple principle: a dialogue that moves a given inquiry forward.
A wide range of websites have implemented live chats into their UX, after understanding that this step makes their products and services more approachable and improves marketing lead generation and overall sales numbers. Enabling chatting in order to improve the customer experience (CX) on a webpage is not necessarily a new idea, but it certainly has grown into a mature and competitive business in recent years. Nowadays you will have used live chats on dozens of websites in order to advance with your questions.
But you’ve probably also encountered the pitfalls of this experience, right?Sometimes actually getting to the chatty part is a frustrating process: registration demands, chats that do not transparently show when someone on the other side has seen your message or is actually replying, delayed responses without notification or justification, chat windows that lack a certain UI quality.. like hyperlinking URLs or enabling image previews or emojis.
The good part: the competitive nature of this niche has brought forward services that are easier to use than others. One particularly positive example from a UX perspective would be Intercom, with a pretty solid vision about what they do and a clean and simple, user-centric design approach.
However, in this segment the focus remains on human-t0-human interaction. How will conversational UX evolve, as machine-to-human dialogues will become more and more ubiquitous?
Chatbots FTW
I handpicked three examples that I find relevant for the chatbot movement.
When I first saw Isil Usum’s concept, it blew me away. Seamlessly introducing a chatbot within an actual conversation, in order to — for example — book a flight and split the payment.
The level of integrated services that would be required to make such a concept a reality is massive, unachievable in the next 3 years, as one of my colleagues claimed. This may be true or not, however I think it’s important to look at the anatomy of the concept, because it outlines the direction we’re heading towards.
Another very interesting approach that’s actually being prototyped in the Fintech Industry by Barclays is described extensively in Noel Lyons’ Medium article — Creating Digital Assistants.
The “digital assistant” is designed to give the user simple answering choices, thus avoiding potential conversational bottlenecks. Also — by making its presence felt in key moments, such an app can (re)spark the customer engagement efficiently and discreetly, without becoming too intrusive or annoying in its purpose. To what extent people are ready to trust a digital assistant for their financial operations — only time will tell.
The third example worth mentioning is Slack. They introduced the slackbot as an extension of the user’s capabilities to perform tasks (faster).
Streamlining routine tasks in a simple conversational manner instead of cluttering a menu bar with options and hidden features is definitely a strong response to an outdated user experience structure.
Dynamic Conversations
As language interpretation becomes more accurate in the A.I. era, the cluttered experiences within many websites and apps will transform into simple dialogues with rapid resolutions.
As pointed out in Marques Brownlee’s video, there are already many things we are achieving, while using a conversational UX.
A challenging situation arises in scenarios when it’s contextually useful to keep track of a previously mentioned thing in order to complete a task.
Saying “Show me [location] on map” followed by the result and afterwards stating “How do I get there?” is just a rudimentary example, where A.I. can better understand the users wishes. Dynamic conversations with chatbots are becoming more insightful and more human with each use.
The greatest advantage, once dynamic conversations will gain maturity: allowing a completely hands-free, speech-driven experience for the most common features one is accustomed to.
I’m still wondering about a telepathic experience though.
Resources
These are definitely worth checking out, while we’re on the topic of conversational UX and chatbots — a clear trend of 2017:
Articles
How we went about creating Input UI Elements for our Chatbot Platform
Emotional Design for Chatbots: How to make humans love your bot
Chatbots round-up #3: the best bots of the month
Inspiration
The fabulous concepts of Isil Usum
Design resources
UI Kit for Bots
Facebook Messenger UI Kit for Chatbots Sketch Resource
Now… go start a conversation(al UX).
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