Why chat bots work

· 4 minute read · via Punchkick
An iPhone 6 lying face up on a dark table

This post is adapted from the Reinventing mobile UX with bots strategy guide, on how brands can use conversational UI to deliver more engaging mobile experiences.

The most compelling thing about chat bots is that they don’t need a manual. They allow users to engage with digital products using their own words and on their own terms. Natural language processing has reached a degree of maturity that bots won’t need to know the exact phrasing of every possible request in order to act upon every single request—and that intelligence is only accelerating as bots proliferate.

Dozens of app content cards, photos above text, laid out in a tilted grid

But using a digital product on the user’s own terms extends beyond literal “terms.” Consider the mobile best practices for organizing an application’s content and navigation. Perhaps there’s a tab bar at the bottom of the screen, or a hamburger menu at the top left corner. Maybe options are laid out in a hierarchical table, and certain content or actions are obscured from view until the user drills down through enough menus. There’s a certain language to it, which can be optimized for as many users as possible, but it’s a language that requires a degree of UX fluency all the same.

With messaging bots, users don’t have to learn anything. If they assume the bot can perform nearly any action they’d expect of the brand—and if there’s graceful error messaging when it can’t—the interaction they have with a bot requires no thought or prior learning. This is enormously powerful as mobile reaches new audiences of varying ages and technical literacy. Imagine someone using an ecommerce app who’s never used a smartphone before. Now imagine that same person dictating requests to a chat bot that can peruse the entire store without the need to drill through various menus.

Example in practice

Three iPhones showing Spring’s personal shopping assistant: its website’s “Send to Messenger” button, then a Messenger chat that asks what kind of shoes and what price range, each answered with a tap

Consider these two incarnations of the Spring app, a popular fashion-focused ecommerce product. On one hand, you have the traditional mobile app user experience, complete with menus and navigation paradigms that would be familiar to most smartphone users. For all its gloss and flat UI design, the app still requires users to be familiar with the trends of how ecommerce sites and apps have always been organized, meaning users would have to navigate through “Women,” “Tops,” “Blouses,” and so on to find the item they want.

Alternatively, consider the Spring bot for Facebook Messenger. Here, the user can immediately request the kind of item they’re shopping for, and the bot provides them with actionable results. No searching, browsing, or poking through menus organized by even the most competent UX designer. Just a request and a response.

Messaging services are the most heavily used apps across mobile platforms, with more than 2.5 billion active users sending trillions of iMessages, WhatsApp messages, SMS messages, and Messenger stickers every day. These services account for a significant portion of the reason that mobile users pull their phone out of their pocket every few minutes, and these communication methods form the backbone of billions of people’s mobile experiences.

These figures indicate that the user experience of composing a message and sending it to a friend is now universally understood among nearly half the planet—and Activate projects messaging app usage to increase to 3.6 billion in the next few years. This is an interaction method that doesn’t need to be taught, because it’s most of what billions of people are using their devices for anyway.

For brands and third-party app developers, this universality of experience should indicate that your apps have a thing or two to learn. Third-party apps should reflect the interaction paradigms users are most familiar with. And in the age of WhatsApp and Messenger, that interaction is more likely to look like a chat conversation than anything from UIKit or Material Design.

Third-party apps should reflect the interaction paradigms users are most familiar with—and in the age of WhatsApp and Messenger, that’s more likely to look like a chat conversation than anything from UIKit or Material Design.

Further, because of the explosive growth of these messaging services, they’ve become hotbeds for innovation among developers and evolved into platforms unto themselves. Today, services like Facebook Messenger, Kik, Skype, Slack, and even iMessage have introduced features that allow third-party developers to build apps and services within users’ messaging conversations. And considering that the top four chat apps have a larger combined user base than the top four social networks, according to BI Intelligence, there’s already an enormous user base waiting to discover your app.

Building apps for Messenger or iMessage puts your brand squarely where your audience already lives, and within the services they already love. This not only aids discoverability of your service, but also accessibility for users who might not be as familiar with mobile UX patterns that others might consider obvious. Bots are the way that brands can take advantage of the global messaging app phenomenon—but that isn’t to say they’re easy to get right.

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