Our attraction to conversation interfaces
A brief historical view on why the conversation has fully infiltrated the web
Early 2016 has seen its fair share of awkward moments, cringeworthy interneting, and shifty soon-to-be world leaders. But I’m here to talk about something far more intriguing and impactful to your future self. I’m talking about the onslaught of conversation-based interfaces.
Online conversations have a long and storied history — most notably in the depths of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and it’s more preppy and colorful cousin AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). They grew from the efficient and timeless command line. Say anything, do anything. Teenagers of my generation spent billions of hours with these programs. Whether it was perfecting grotesque boy humor or middle school gossip — socializing computer-to-computer began to take a serious form. This chat room style felt natural. I speak to you with my keyboard, and you speak to me with yours. Hell, if you were popular enough, dozens of people could congregate in the same e-room! This lead to its own organized chaos that lived on for quite some time happily and undisturbed. You still see them today if you, say, illegally stream an NBA game off of some website you can’t pronounce.
Texting enters the ring
Mobile phones adopted this concept and provided the new medium its (arguably) most popular service — texting. A civilization-changing global event that has yet to be stopped. It made my teenage years slightly less awkward, and improved my single-finger typing all at once. This truly remarkable concept had to be compressed into the archaic and simplified interface of early phones, which could not display the chat room style as easily as a large screen. This led to what I call call-and-response chatting. I send a message, you read it, and send one back. You could only read one message at a time. This was basically the opposite of what a natural conversation felt like. It was closer to snail mail than anything.
Eventually, enough time and resources were put into what we now consider a refined texting interface. Speech bubbles, contextual alignment, color indicators, emojis, and multimedia are now concretely engrained in our interaction library. Hell, sometimes I picture emojis and rage faces when I’m having a real-world conversation. Total immersion is upon us. Or maybe I’m just weird.
The hot new app
As I said, 2016 is now bringing this intuitive and familiar world into selling us stuff using math and fake people named Phillip. Apps like Operator, Facebook Messenger, Shyp, Kik, and Bloom That (to name a select few) use the comfortable interface to buy things and spend money without really feeling like we are. This concept, to me, is a natural evolution and I truly do love how simple the experience is, but part of me wonders if it came out of necessity to “reshape” the commerce platform, or have we found our pinnacle human interface? A command line wrapped in a familiar shell, where you truly feel like you’re interacting with someone of comparable intelligence. It’s the new checkout line — without gossip magazines or Mentos.
This interface has been around since I was developing into a functional human being. Before complex emotions, social cues, or proper grammar were part of my persona, I knew how to use it. I knew how to change the text to huge and bright fucking pink in AIM. I knew how to join channels in IRC, and I know which autocorrected words raise my blood pressure the fastest in iOS. Why wouldn’t it be used to provide complicated services if we have it memorized like the first level of Dots?
Make my life easier, Phillip
For example, booking flights is a pain in the ass. It takes digging, searching, comparing, ugly form fields, vague questions, second guessing yourself, date checking, double-date checking, triple-date checking, and eventually you get a thousand emails confirming your flight. Fuck that. How about I just tell a robot to book it at this date and to this destination? All the other bullshit will eventually figure itself out. The price inflation is most likely worth the decrease in stress and time wasted. Also, they give you price options just in case you are counting pennies. It takes the robot Phillip milliseconds to complete this task. Me? Probably 30 minutes.
It begs the question if using a chat interface is just a tech fad for commerce, or if it will become second-nature only to verbal speech. As noted earlier, it is just a complicated and gussied-up command line with another entity. We’ve done a great job at merging speech and text via Siri and other voice recognition software, but will this mashing slowly erode the usefulness of conversational UI? Or, if something will come around that makes texting or speaking (or both) obsolete. And if this new super cool technology comes around, how little effort will it take me to order last minute flowers for Mother’s Day?
