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Zach Abrams
I write things · Product for Remind — founded Evenly, acq by Square · I’m a mediocre athlete :)

Quartz is novel, not great.

Thoughts on where conversational UI will and should go.

With the recent launch of the Quartz news app, conversational UIs are getting another vote of confidence and a ton of interest. After all, Quartz is now the #1 featured app in the app store, and every tech outlet has written something about this product.

Despite all of the interest, I doubt this app will see meaningful long term engagement. To it’s benefit, the onboarding experience is amazing. However, once its time to use the core features, the conversational UI feels more like a obstacle than a benefit. Pressing my way through each headline, it would forever to get through the key stories for the day; with any conventional news app, that same process takes 1 glance. Once novelty wears off, consumers used to immediate access to information, rich content, and deeper engagement will likely walk away from Quartz and resume their use of more traditional apps. 
 
Although Quartz hasn’t nailed the experience, they provide more directional support for where conversational UI could go. Here are some key themes that have started to emerge:

  • Natural language is so nice. People absolutely love engaging with products that organically make sense. When you’re introduced to a new product and it speaks your language, adoption becomes much easier. No more learning new navigation systems or swipe gestures.
  • Text is a great conversation starter. From onboarding to initiating a request, text is a great introductory point for a larger, deeper experience. For example, typing “restaurant recommendations” is easier than opening Foursquare and navigating around.
  • But it can’t be the only means of navigation. If you push all engagement through text, the experience feels slow and cumbersome. Let’s not forget, people hate typing —there have been 1000's of companies started to remove the need for manually entered words.
  • Allow for deep interactions. Web and native apps are amazing at browsing content, comparing services or products, wasting time, and much more. When tasks get complicated, purely conversation UI will break down. Sometimes its easier to do, than to say.
  • Be connective, not obtrusive. Text UI appears to be at its best when it serves as a medium to bring together formally disconnected services; look at WeChat as an example. As such, conversational UI will likely be more of a replacement to the browser than a replacement to the app.

Messenger with its rich, interactive widgets and Telegram with its custom keyboards are in the forefront of realizing some of this promise. That being said, there’s no single service that’s created a consumer tool via contextual UI that would be considered truly disruptive. We’re still in the “oh that’s nice” phase.