Conversational UIs are breaking out of messaging apps and into products we use every day.

It’s often said design is a dialogue between designer and user. We talk to users about what they want and need. We discuss projects with our colleagues to examine problems and uncover solutions.

Conversation is such a great way of achieving clarity of thought, even if you’re just talking to yourself.

But conversation only really begins when a user gets involved. We make things, put them out there, and wait to see how the world responds.

Conversation is growing increasingly relevant to digital product design in a more literal sense. Our interactions with computers have always been fundamentally rooted in input/output, call and response. But as computers have grown increasingly sophisticated, so too has their ability to communicate in a more human way.

Conversing with a computer has long been a trope of sci-fi, and a goal of many researchers. The reality of how this is actually playing out differs slightly from the predictions of the past. But it has arrived. Conversation has become a user interface.

CONVERSATION AS DESIGN MATERIAL

Given so much of our work is based on the back and forth exchange of ideas, it’s not surprising designers are imagining a new generation of messaging products, with dialogue at their center. Conversational UIs are breaking out of messaging apps and into products we use every day.

The cause of this shift is simple: human nature.

We’re innately tuned to converse with others. It’s how we share knowledge, how we organise ourselves, and how we share emotions. Language has been part of our makeup for hundreds of thousands of years. So of course we message all day long in bursts and binges, with family, friends, and colleagues. Messaging has become a layer through which daily lives are conducted.

Think about it: how long did it take this morning before you sent or received a message on your phone? Look at the list of the most popular apps in the world: of the top 10, all are social in nature, and 6 are primarily for messaging.

The history of personal computing is best described as the continual removal of layers of abstraction between machines and people; the progression from inscrutable punch cards, to arcane command line, to mouse pointer to multitouch.

In each change, the interface became less couched in the native language of the machine and more accessible to the human using it. The next step is for machines to extend and adapt themselves to how we naturally communicate.

THE RISE OF CONVERSATIONAL UIS

Conversational interfaces have created a whole new set of opportunities and challenges for designers. What if we could build products that facilitate conversations not just between two people, but between a person and a service? I’ve written before about this new breed of app, but it’s interesting to unpack how some of them work.

Concierge services like Path Talk and Magic promise to answer your questions and deliver just about anything to your door, all via text message. How they do it is actually a little deflating: they have banks of support agents who read incoming messages, fulfill each request manually, and then type out replies. This is the Mechanical Turk approach to software, the wizard behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. It’s capital intensive, scales poorly and arguably only redistributes the work, creating low-value jobs for the human agents.

Others like Facebook M and Operator have plans for a less manual approach, using artificial intelligence to answer questions. Using these apps, you’re no longer messaging with a headset-clad human, but with a bot.

At its simplest, a bot is a piece of software that runs inside a messaging app that can perform basic tasks. It’s like Siri, if Siri were a friend in your contact list you could text. So you can send a message to a bot, and it can send you a reply. But it can also perform tasks for you. Let’s say you needed a taxi. Just text the bot that sits inside your messaging app, and it will take care of the rest.