Bots and buttons
Your bot shouldn’t be conversational 🙊
Chatbots are great. They live in your messenger, require no installation and are a breeze to use. Until they aren’t.
I’ve run across many bots that attempt to use natural language processing (NLP) to understand user requests and fulfill them. A classic problem with this model has to do with the scope of possible requests: your bot could never handle the entire spectrum, even in a narrow domain.
Another aspect of this problem is the user’s distorted perception of the bot. For example, a chatbot that provides website analytics might be able to answer complex queries such as “how many users from Germany visited my site on July 24”, but the user will be unaware of this capability: instead, they’d limit themselves to asking more banal questions, or analytics requests that aren’t supported at all (“show me heatmaps from last week”).
Finally, the benefits of natural language aren’t always obvious. Typing queries can be tedious when a GUI app alternative is just a tap away.
The solution? Handy, squishy buttons.
Buttons are often treated as a temporary solution, a quick-fix glue for creating useful bots until we have access to proper NLP solutions. In my opinion, buttons are way better than NLP!
They define the scope instantly, thus circumventing dissatisfaction.
They guide the user’s perception of the software, letting them know of all the clever stuff they can use it for.
And they only require one tap to use.
With buttons, bots retain all the distribution and accessibility benefits, without sacrificing the user experience.
Yala originally only used textual commands — but it now has beautiful Slack buttons! Click here to join our beta and let Yala schedule your social media posts with flair.
If you like buttons, go ahead and hit that 💚. It means a lot.
