Designing conversations for the New Generations
As many other founders, we started Sure because we weren’t satisfied with what’s been out there and wanted to selfishly build a product for ourselves. The endless results from Google were just too mediocre and we would always prefer asking a friend for a recommendation where to go, rather than reading the abstract reviews on Yelp or TripAdvisor. As a result of this, Sure was born. Chatbot for spot on food and drink recommendations.
As we grow and understand our users better, we see that they share some of the Millennial values with respect to which we also design our product.
Rather than calling out Millennials or Gen Z, our friends at Bespoke refer to them as the New Generation. In their recent research, they found out that “human needs and motivations haven’t changed much from the other generations — but the means and how we go about satisfying them have changed dramatically” (The New Generations Trend Research by Bespoke, 2016).
We believe that there are 5 trends that in turn suggest that conversational interfaces could be the future for any product built for this generation of people shaped by technology and access.
Information overload 😱
Being constantly connected causes the struggle with information overload. One of our main value propositions at Sure is that we help to condense the information for the user. Receiving 3–5 highly curated suggestions you can trust via conversational search is much more powerful than pages of endless options.
Paradox of choice 👀
With information overload comes also the paradox of choice. Decision making is hard and that’s partly why we see subscription businesses like Birchbox become so successful by helping their customers decide. Instead of replicating Google or Yelp, we do the legwork for our users so when they search for a Vietnamese restaurant in London, Sure doesn’t show them all 300, including those that are permanently closed or have poor reviews.
Trust in friends and social influencers 💃
Everybody has a voice and power to become an influencer. According to TapInfluence, 92% of consumers rely on referrals from people they know over anything else. We decided to apply this learning and curate all our places from selected blogs and influencers on Instagram and YouTube.
Hyper-personalisation 😍
The New Generations tend to feel a strong emotional connection to the brands they support. The personalised nature of messaging helps to facilitate this customer-brand relationship. At Sure, we strive to achieve the right balance between personalised and contextual recommendations and over-personalised messaging.
One-to-one communication 💁
We already know that messaging apps are replacing social media. According to Facebook, 65% Millennials and Gen Xers prefer to message a business than call or email when chatting one-to-one or with a group. There are several reasons for this, one of them being the faster response time. Sure being a concierge-like service, feels like having a friend on Facebook Messenger that knows all the best spots in town —you just happen to share that friend with thousands of other users.
As always your feedback is very important to us, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and 💚 this post if you enjoyed it.
Together with Bespoke we hosted an event at Space10 as part of the #CPHFTW Copenhagen Tech Fest where we talked about this topic. Check out the slides here 👇
