Conversational UX design is evolving as more and more apps begin to incorporate conversational UI functionality. While the concept of a messaging-centric UI can seem simple, the melding of a messaging-first user experience is nothing to underestimate. Conversational user interfaces can be simple for humans to interact with (you are just chatting back and forth), however, blending in and balancing rich visualization and complex interactions is not simple to get right. Just like any other UX, it is a balance of minimalism while allowing for rich expressiveness in the UI without overwhelming the user.
Slack
is one of the leading platforms for building bots, especially for
enterprise applications. However Slack has a number of bot
conversational UX features that are still missing relative to other
platforms such as FB Messenger and FB Workplace.
To
give some perspective, here is my compiled list of features I would
like to see in Slack's bot framework to improve its messaging UX and
bring it on par with platforms like FB Messenger:
1) Conversational Streams and UI Alignment
Slack
bots (especially in direct-messaging one-on-one dialog flows) force the
bot and the user to both be left justified in the messaging UI stream.
This goes against UI norms found in the majority of messaging
application and related best practices for messaging apps. Typically in a
streaming messaging flow, your conversational stream (you being the
person interacting with the bot) is on the right of the screen and the
party you are talking to (in this case the bot) is on the left side of
the screen (or it can be visa-versa).
This
is something not supported in Slack and makes a number of things
awkward and cluttered in a bot-to-human dialog, especially when it is
one-on-one (as opposed to Slack group channel). In Slack the entire
conversational interaction is left justified, which can make the UI look
cluttered when there are visual rich elements involved and and things
like "Quick Replies" in the back and forth stream.
I
hope that Slack will allow for aligning the bot vs the user on
different sides of the messaging stream, something more similar to how
FB Messenger works. This will allow for a more natural conversational
interaction.
2) Horizontal Scrolling Carousel UI Components
Slack
(mobile and desktop/web) does not provide any kind of horizontal card
or horizontal scrolling carousel. While some might consider this bad
design (to allow for horizontal scrolling of cards), it is often
necessary to minimize the vertical area needed to display information in
rich messaging interactions. FB Messenger allows for limited horizontal
scrolling carousel that I find to be very useful when building bots.
Hopefully Slack will incorporate this. Slack already supports rich
"attachments", so it would be a natural fit to allow for some limited
level or horizontal scrolling.
3) WebView Integration
Slack
does not have explicit support for messaging buttons that open a
webview UI. Sometimes a webview is needed to show rich web content
(again here this kind of feature should not be abused). FB Messenger has
this ability and allows for controlling how the webview window is
opened and closed. This can be mimicked in Slack by using embedding
links in the "field" elements for example, but is a bit of a hack.
4) Quick Reply Buttons
One
particularly nice feature I got accustomed to using in Facebook
Messenger is the feature referred to as "Quick Reply". This allows the
bot to display "Quick Reply" buttons that are shortcuts for the user to
enter commands that they would normally have to type.
There
is a away to mimic quick replies in Slack, but again it is a bit of
hack. Check this open source node/slack project for an example of how
this works with Slack. Quick replies are a real necessity in a rich
messaging interaction. Again here, I hope that Slack adds this feature
natively instead of making bot frameworks jump through hoops to emulate
this feature.
Hopefully
the Slack product team will address these issues as Slack is by far the
best team and enterprise collaboration/messaging platform on the market
today.
FB
Messenger might have some superior bot-to-human interaction and UX
capabilities, but it inherently lacks the team collaboration
functionality and the many third-party integrations that Slack has to
offer.
I do believe FB Workplace will close the gap over time, and in many ways has advantages over Slack in terms of out of the box social collaboration functionality. Slack is a bit of geeky technical tool when it comes to social collaboration and thus not as intuitive to use.
I do believe FB Workplace will close the gap over time, and in many ways has advantages over Slack in terms of out of the box social collaboration functionality. Slack is a bit of geeky technical tool when it comes to social collaboration and thus not as intuitive to use.
I
expect both FB Workplace and Slack to evolve as head to head
competitors and battle for the hearts and minds of developers much like
how Netscape battled Microsoft's Internet Explorer for web domination.
For enterprise owners and enterprise end user, intelligent AI endowed
virtual assistants and bots will usher in a new era of innovation not
seen since the dot-com days. The battle has moved from the mobile app
store to the AI app store where natural language understanding and deep
learning are the killer technologies in the arsenal of AI sophisticated
developers.
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