conversational UI

Nowadays, Messaging apps are taking over the world and app stores reveal their rankings with incredible retention and engagement rates. Studies show that every community, marketplace, on-demand service, dating app, social game or e-commerce product has or will soon have Therefore, we’re witnessing an explosion of applications that no longer have a graphical user interface (GUI). In fact, they’ve actually been around for a while, but they’ve only recently started spreading into the mainstream. They are often called bots, virtual assistants, //"> invisible apps. They can run on Slack, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, plain SMS, or Amazon Echo. They can also be entirely driven by artificial intelligence, or there can be a human behind the curtain. With all these activities, there has been a lot of discussion around conversational UI and how the pattern of communicating with people and computers is blending in messaging or voice interaction with simple commands, and simple, mostly textual responses, occasionally paired with a photo. As much as we like text and photos, there is a much broader, unexplored potential in blending conversational interfaces with rich graphical UI elements.

As result, the design of conversational user interfaces (for example for websites) will become an increasingly important topic for most web designers in 2017. However, there are still a lot of questions unsolved, but rest assured: conversational interfaces and the experiences of those are becoming a big topic in 2017.