Introduction
We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying?
—Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
I once worked with a client in an entrepreneurial corner of an old-school, multinational publishing company. Tilting towards the future, the publishing company had developed a web-based, semantic search engine. They hoped the search engine would help business leaders extract more value from news by making meaningful connections among stories.
From the moment the site launched, virtually every visitor to the homepage bounced without taking action. The creators were shocked and dismayed. They had believed the technology was so exciting and powerful that their audience of executives would find the intricacies of the interface delightful. But the design was a flop. So, they hired our design firm to fix it.
Untangling the functionality and simplifying the interface was going to take a bit of time. I suggested we at least add an instructive sentence or two to the interface in the meantime.
The Client: “Well, our team has talked about that and we haven’t been able to agree on exactly what it should say.”
Me: “Why don’t you just put a few helpful words at the top of the page and you can change it as soon as you think of something better.”
“Oh, no. We couldn’t do that. We have to go through an approval process and we can’t just rewrite copy once it’s been approved.”
“But right now there are no instructions. No one who lands on this page has any clue what to do. Really, just a single sentence would be better. And you can change it at any time. This is the web. This is your interface, not a contract.”
“I’ll take your idea back. But we really want to be careful and make sure it’s right before we commit to anything.”
My arguments went nowhere. Authority prevailed. We would just have to wait for the new design.
This story has a bitter end. The parent company lost faith and killed its own darling. They shut down the business unit and sold the technology for parts before we could get our work out into the world. Anyone who’s worked with a legacy business trying to transform itself by embracing digital technology has seen this sort of thing happen.
That seemingly minor objection to adding some language to the interface stuck with me. It was at the root of why the project failed. When a publishing company with established processes for writing got into interaction design, old and new approaches across disciplines collided and produced an extreme illustration of a common and often unexamined divide.
The Great Divide
The client confounded us by having two decision paths. Anything involving visual elements or non-verbal interface behaviors was on the design-decision path. On this path, they were comfortable trying things, working collaboratively, and iterating quickly. And they trusted our recommendations.
Decisions about words were on the writing path. These decisions needed to go through the established editorial process. The client fretted over every revision and expected the choices we made to represent commitments—once edited and approved, language would not change. The fewer words we used in the interface (and therefore the more it represented design), the better the client felt about our work.
Over the years, I’ve seen this dynamic play out again and again. I’ve worked with clients who asked whether we could use an icon instead of text, and interface designers who’ve broken into a cold sweat when asked about the lorem ipsum.
Organizations committed to “multidisciplinary design collaboration” will put together teams of visual interface designers, developers, and interaction designers, yet there’ll be one writer working in solitary two buildings away.
We’re all working on one system. Why do we form teams around the artifacts people produce instead of the problem they should be working together to solve? It’s not as though the user is going to interact with the information architecture, then the visual style, then the code, and, at some point after the editorial approval process, pick up the interface copy to read at bedtime.
Interactive digital design is still ensnared by its graphic design roots. Portfolios consist of sets of rectangles. And discussions about Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) tend to focus only on the graphical aspect. As much as people still talk about thinking outside the box, design often remains comfortably inside it.
Just draw a rectangle shape, maybe 5 or 6 shapes on a sheet of paper, then draw the features you want on each view of your app.
—Beginner’s Guide to iOS Development: The Interface
It’s easy to conflate the value of the system with the surface appeal of its visual representation. First make nice rectangles, then add meaning to rectangles. But rectangles of features do not represent the value in our apps. And there is no way of knowing what each view should include until considering what the user needs. Designing the container first makes even less sense when the containers are starting to disappear.
Our Robot Friends
If we believe machine intelligence will make our applications smarter, they might as well just start talking to us. That’s why conversation is the new interface.
A confluence of recent advances in technology is radically reshaping how humans interact with digital systems—and with each other through these systems. Cloud computing has allowed internet-connected devices to access immense amounts of data storage and processing power. The popularity of texting gave way to the rise of messaging apps that are cheaper than SMS, faster than email, and make it easy to share all manner of media. Increased access to processing power and data also gave a boost to machine learning. This has allowed computers to perform tasks by generalizing from examples, and to improve over time based on new data—and all this without explicit programming. Apple put Siri in the iPhone. And Amazon made a talking speaker.
So, now there’s a lot of enthusiasm for chatting with software through “conversational interfaces” that can interpret natural language on the fly—whether typed or spoken. Chatbots text us and “intelligent assistants” answer our utterances.
It’s terrific that we’re now talking about the importance of conversation as an interface, and language as part of design. However, an interface that seems conversational on the surface may not be conversational in practice.
Conversation is not a new interface. It’s the oldest interface. Conversation is how humans interact with one another, and have for millennia. We should be able to use the same principles to make our digital systems easy and intuitive to use by finally getting the machines to play by our rules.
Unfortunately, overly literal interpretations of the idea are leading to systems that are hard to use. Being able to exchange text messages with a bot doesn’t necessarily make it easier for people to reach their goals. We must go deeper. Otherwise we’re just making things harder on ourselves and those we’re designing for.
Towards Conversational Design
These days, many designers and businesses are embracing the idea of conversational interactions to mean literally talking to or messaging a digital system. Advances in artificial intelligence, voice user interfaces (VUI), and chatbots show a lot of promise. But conversational design is more than creating interfaces that talk and text.
Taking a conversational approach to interaction design requires applying the deeper principles of how humans interact with one another so we can create systems that succeed on human terms, no matter the mode of interaction.
Fortunately, we can draw on a set of principles for how we communicate and interact with one another—the principles of conversation. A good conversation is more than an exchange of phrases, it begins with an unspoken agreement and succeeds with cooperation towards a goal. These principles can guide our choices in what kind of systems we create, the interfaces we design, and how we work together to create something meaningful and valuable.
Conversational design is truly human-centered design, every step of the way. There is no next big thing, only the next step in an unfolding story of how people use technology to be more themselves.