Developers Rejoice and Designers Mourn as UI Is Dead
Why? The resurgence of conversational commerce, a term attributed to Uber’s Chris Messina in 2015 for the utilization of chat, messaging and other natural language interfaces (like voice) to interact with people, brands or services and bots. “Resurgence?” you ask. Let’s be realistic. Conversational commerce has been around for years. We just have a new label for it.
As a youngster, I spent many weekends with my father inside the big, cold, sterile computer rooms where I didn’t know there were more than two colors, green and amber. This chat with a computer interface was very similar to the scene in the 1983 movie War Games. It certainly wasn’t pretty then and to think, more than 30 years later, it hasn’t changed much.
Let’s look at a few different messaging platforms:
Slack
Facebook Messenger
HipChat
The point of this is, the app has control of the UI. As marketers, designers, developers, the only things you have control of is your logo, your graphic and your content. Your content is your style. No Photoshop required. Everything is stripped way leaving your storytelling skills, context + content + communication and don’t forget LOGIC.
If you’re tired of piddling around with CSS, this may be the best news you’ve heard all year. And don’t forget voice. Voice makes it easy for me to respond while driving or get directions from my smartphone. This makes it feel more natural and conversational for me to maneuver through the purchasing process. It’s also easier to discern sentiment and potentially give different users different results than a simple text-based response. And again, no UI required.
Digital designers shouldn’t worry though. No need to go back to school or work on you starving artist lifestyle. This won’t last long. Users aren’t programmers. They aren’t comfortable with command line input. We won’t see mass adoption without of chatbots without a pretty interface. They will want more functionality that the current messaging platforms provide.
What we have now is a version 1.0 of conversational commerce. I fully expect to see mini-apps to proliferate inside these platforms allowing for users to feel more comfortable with the ability to do more.
Do we really want to shop like this? A throwback to a 1980s predictable RPG-like create your own adventure story.
It’s impressive how far we’ve come from a technology and development perspective but for mass adoption, we still have a way to go.