Technical and Social Dialogue Challenges

Original author: Adrian Zumbrunnen
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I made my site interactive. It tells what I learned.

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A few weeks ago, I started an experiment on my site . I made it interactive. The feedback, reviews and online coverage were absolutely amazing. I received over 300 notes in the mail in the first 24 hours.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to chat with me on the site. This was spectacular!

Some of you asked me to share your understanding of the situation. Since the whole thing began as a conversation, I would like to reproduce it in the same form.

So go ahead.

My mother always told me that nothing good comes out of fear, and yet fear is an incredibly powerful tool. It makes us change and grow in order to overcome it.

The idea to make my site interactive came from a simple question that I posted on Twitter and LinkedIn a few weeks ago:

What will you do if the bots win and the developers become unnecessary?

The question was a bit humorous, but I did not expect such a simple and direct answer:

“I’ll fire you!” - Rafael Leiteris, director of product management at Google

Rafael is an extremely nice person. He obviously (hopefully) joked, and yet his words made me think:

How will developers like me fit into the dialogue era?

Perhaps more importantly, what impact will this have on user experience development in general? Is all this movement really only for large companies or can anyone become part of it? Was all this hype with the messages that we observed the last two years about dialogue interfaces from the very beginning? Question by question ...

I decided to overcome my fear and gain some practical experience. I entered my site into the chat. He can be seen in action here .

Warning: if you somehow talk to yourself in front of the mirror, you will get a lot of pleasure building your own chat bot.

Everything is all right, let's begin. Here are 9 considerations that have appeared on my way ...
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1. The writing process is becoming more and more important in our business.


When I started this experiment, I thought that most of the time would be spent on development and programming. I was wrong.

The process of writing the text took significantly longer than the development and programming combined.

A key role in creating dialogue interaction belongs to the dialogue itself. In other words - words ! Therefore, it would seem that it should not have been unexpected that writing is the most time-consuming part of the work, but still it happened.

I started developing dialogue in iA Writer .

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The first outline of dialogue interaction

Then I developed the concept of “conversational paths”: a small portion of chat messages that might trigger a different set of messages. The dialog paths allowed me to develop and model most of the desired dialogs.

It was a good start. But it was not enough.
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2. Isolated messages are not perceived as messages from a person


When communicating with a person in real life, the outcome of the interaction, to a high degree, depends on how it began and how it developed. In many cases, it is considered inconvenient to repeat the topic. After talking about the weather, I want to move on to more interesting topics and probably avoid all this discussion of weather altogether.

To avoid the repetition of robotic messages, I had to change the way I went out for testing.

Instead of just making sure all the dialogue paths work from the position of functionality, I clicked each of them, making sure that they also work from the position of social interaction .

I was surprised how much the results of these approaches vary. I found many scenarios where the unnaturalness of the dialogue was felt simply because there were subtle repeats or slightly unusual connecting sentences.

You can not think of dialogs as isolated messages that can be layered on top of each other. It is necessary to take into account the entire course of the dialogue, so that it is perceived as natural.
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3. Amazing details


Amazing details are revealed in the game with users.

Details, nuances in the text and in the use of technology can affect the dialogue critically - make it unconvincing or, conversely, arouse interest in the user.

For example, refreshing a page changes what the bot produces. Instead of just “Hello!” Now appears: “Welcome back! ". This will even slightly change the dialogue path, which will be discussed in more detail later in the discussion of the study of the dialogue context .

So what happened here?

When people noticed this for the first time, they realized that the bot is smarter than they thought at first. Their approach to the interface has changed. They suddenly wondered:

What else could this thing do?

When experimenting with interfaces, keep in mind that one thing will certainly be present: people will fool around with them. One of my goals was to seamlessly embed the classic contact form as part of the dialogue.

Clicking on “Get in touch!” Gives the user the opportunity to enter his message:

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Communication after clicking “Get in touch!”

And here things went unpleasantly. Many spoke obscenities to my bot, many reported the wrong email address. I designed my bot to be useful, and not be a jerk. So I had to come up with something ...

I began to add an email check:“Your email address reminds me of a not-so-decent emoticon. Something is wrong here ... ”

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Communication after writing“ You suck ”instead of providing a valid e-mail address.

The dialogue check made people smile. I was tweeted about this. They felt caught and probably thought: “Damn, but I thought I would get away with some gibberish .

- What is the lesson?

If someone starts fooling around with your interface, you start fooling around with that “someone.” This is naturally pleasant and is part of building user relationships.

I do not want to disturb the rest. Maybe you will find some other hidden gems.
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4. Dialog context forms topics


Представьте, что вы — разработчик, собирающийся на шикарную вечеринку с коктейлем. Вы знаете, что большинство людей на ней также разработчики. Это повлияет на то, как вы начнёте общение?

Для большинства людей — несомненно.

Вместо того чтобы начать разговор: «Привет, как дела, вам нравится только что приготовленный банановый коктейль?», — вы скажете, наверно, что-нибудь вроде, — «Вы тоже разработчик или занимаетесь чем-то другим?».

Второе начало разговора привязано к общей теме вечеринки, тогда как «банановый коктейль» более интересен и менее серьёзен — особенно на шикарной вечеринке с коктейлем.

For most people, it is easier to start a conversation with a more rational question, even though an emotional question would probably leave a more memorable impression. I am sure that you had a similar experience in one of those “network” events where the weather was a leading topic.

Therefore, I wondered how to embed the concept of the contextual beginning of the dialogue in the interaction being developed?

Understanding the context can greatly improve the way we start communication. When someone comes to my site from Medium or Twitter, it is very likely that this “someone” is interested in development. He may have come across a tweet, article, or some link on one of these platforms. I wanted to add this approach to the dialog:

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Dialog context

People who came to my site from the Kenny Chen's UX newsletter were also surprised when the bot started a dialogue with the words: “It looks like you came from the blessed Kenny newsletter. You are probably also involved in development, is not it? " .

This small adjustment not only improved the course of the dialogue and made it more human, but it also made some of its features more visible.

More on this in the next section.
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5. Hidden "features"


My site can offer articles on user interaction (UX) in the Quartz-style interface. But if I do not know for sure that users are interested in user interaction (UX), of course, I will not start to bother them with these articles.

That would look extremely strange. As if to stop a complete stranger on the street and start to explain to him why we should get rid of the hamburger menu in the developments for mobile devices.

Knowing that the user came from Medium allows me to smoothly make the transition to the topic of conversation, asking the user a contextual question:

Are you probably also dealing with user interaction?

The answer is yes.puts the chatbot on a conversation about the latest articles on user interaction (UX), including my personal thoughts on this. But the chatbot will never recommend one article twice - we don’t want to allow duplicates, right?

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A more detailed discussion of the article

A more complex aspect of the described situation is the repeated exit from the discussion of the article. But this is another time.
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6. Interpretation of changes in time intervals


In my discussion of purposeful movement in development, I look at how time intervals can change the way we get information about our actions, our environment, and even our perceptions.

But time goes beyond animation or any other topic. Time affects everything. It is not surprising that it has the strongest effect on social dynamics.

Imagine that you just met someone you really like. You exchanged phone numbers and are now looking forward to the next meeting. When to write to this person? Immediately or wait? If you wait, how much?

Time can work both for you and against you. Its effect is so subtle and obscure that it is difficult to understand how it can affect the meaning of our words and even change it.

Suppose you wrote to Anna:

Hello Anna, I was very glad to meet you! Bob

Now ... What type of answer do you prefer - immediately or within the next three days?

But regardless of your preferences, one thing is true, no doubt: the time interval before an answer will affect your interpretation . While an instant response will cause immediate positive feelings, the response after a long delay will contain a magical additional component: waiting .

Without going into too much detail, we can say that expectation and delay greatly affect our assessment and the way we communicate. I believe that there are four lengths of time intervals that are important for dialogue interactions:

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The driving force of the dialogue

Instant <10 seconds The
answer comes immediately. This is the default when communicating right now.

Thinking> 30 seconds The
interlocutor needs some time to answer. For example, you communicate with your half, and she asks you: “Why are you late today?” . You will probably need a few seconds to create a creative explanation before you start typing the answer.

If the dialogue interaction shows activity during input, then only this reflects all the additional dynamics that exist in the communication of the real world. Such dynamics are often lost in digital communication.

Long break> 1 hour.
This interval usually means that the interlocutor was interrupted and he (she) will return to you later. This phenomenon informs about employment and is a good tool in modern communication, both in business and in personal life.

Make-up> 3 days
When the conversation is stalled and you either return apologizing for such a delay, or start a completely new topic.

Due to the simplicity of my experiment, I only dealt with the first category of time intervals. I added an input animation that had a different delay, depending on the following:

- The length of the message

- The size of the screen space occupied by the message

These two variables provide two things. Firstly, the interaction leaves a human feeling, since a longer message requires more time to enter.

Secondly, as a result, the dialogue partner can consider each message. When a chat bot sends a video, it can take up a lot of space on the screen; if the video and the long text go sequentially almost immediately after each other, then you immediately feel that communication is with the bot. There is a feeling of spam.

A more sophisticated chat interface with natural language processing may even add other psychological elements, such as indecision in the first category.

“Hi Siri, take a walk tonight?”
...
input lag
...
“I'm not sure ... is it worth it?”

Time slots display many of the most important elements of rhetoric, and they are an integral part of conversational interaction.
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7. Animation becomes part of communication


Motion has a huge impact on how we feel about the interface. It can do something that the traditional information architecture cannot do - to establish communications in an observable interactive way.

I spent quite a lot of time working out the trajectories of movement and ways to implement the animation. I believe that it was animation that was an important reason for such a positive reception of my experiment. I would say even stronger:

Without animation, there is no dialogue.

Consider why.

First: the animation adds dynamics to the interface. The dynamics that are part of the natural characteristics of the dialogue itself.

Thin passing animation enhances the sense of joke, reprise, similarly, we can assume how “bubbles” appear for text inserts in the comic strip (the animation can be different depending on the type of comic strip - this is a serious comic strip).

Second: the animation attracts attention. When the chatbot finishes speaking, two options appear at the bottom of the screen. I picked up the delay between the last message and the appearance of the first button below. It was possible to choose such a value at which users focused on these buttons immediately after the bot entered text.

Third: animation supports the idea of ​​interaction. The slightly playful button animation draws attention and invites the user to have some fun. And then pressing the button turns the game into the message itself.

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Converting a button into a message

This animation is actually one of the most important points.

Why?

Because it changes the way people perceive dialogue. Many people asked me what natural language processing technology I use. At first I did not understand why they asked me about it, but then it dawned on me:

The fact that people can watch how their choices become part of the dialogue changes their perception of the process. Users suddenly realized that they were seeing their own words, their own choices. While without animation there was a feeling of isolation. Without animation, the dialogue felt like it was scripted and unnatural.

Animation not only strengthened the interaction in my experiment - it became an essential part of it.
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8. Chat can convey what the site is not capable of.


Using skilful insets and elaborate headlines, advertising firms and web agencies try to differentiate themselves from each other. I'm doing the same thing. I call myself a coffee lover. Creative, right?

But trying to be different can sometimes have the opposite effect. We either go too far and become too different, or we try to be so different from all the others that we end up with a complete absence of differences.

My dialogue interaction is located at the very top of my site. Scrolling down shows my traditional site. When I first missed the conversation, I was in some shock.

There was a significant discrepancy between the two approaches.

The design of my site is such that some would call it well, very Swiss. It has a lot of white space, it is quite minimalist, and there are almost no colors on it. In short, he is not entirely emotional.

At the same time, the chatbot sends emoticons, chuckles and jokes. He is full of emotions. In other words: he has personality .

These two development approaches reflect different aspects of my personality. The more rational was embodied in a traditional site, and the more emotional in dialogue.

Any development is always a reflection of itself. The dialogue interaction shows more clearly and fully who I am.
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9. Communication may exit the script


When we think about dialog interfaces, we often consider “bubbles” for text inserts on a rectangular screen. What should I do if the dialogue interaction suddenly comes out of the scenario that was originally developed for it?

There was a magical moment when I first watched the television show "House of Cards". Suddenly Frank Underwood spoke to me. He told me about his plans and even released some of his obscene jokes. The first time I saw anything like this. At first it was a little awkward, but soon it became one of the most iconic elements of the series. I felt like I became part of the plot.

In the film industry, this concept is called "demolition of the fourth wall."

What happens if you apply the same idea to dialog interfaces?

Imagine I want to send you notifications. Studies of user interactions have repeatedly shown that a request for permission works better if the user understands the reason for the request.

We can take this idea and adapt it to the dialogue context. In my case, the interface should give something like:

“Hello! I just noticed that you come here quite often. Maybe you will give permission to receive notifications - then I could notify you immediately when I receive something new, which I could share? ”The

user will answer either “ Yes! Not bad! ” Or “ No. Thank you! " . If the user selects “yes”, the communication will continue ...

"Sumptuously! In the upper right corner of the browser there is a drop-down dialog. Click “allow” and we are ready! ”The

user clicks“ allow ”and the dialog interface immediately responds to its action.

“Great! I feel that this is the beginning of a wonderful friendship. ”

This is just a way to illustrate the concept of demolition of the fourth wall in interactive development. Communication (dialogue) can and probably should even continue beyond the boundaries of the storyline.

Conclusion


The development of dialogue interactions is difficult because the concept of dialogue is associated with a lot of expectations. When these expectations are met, we feel that the interface is natural, but as soon as they are violated, even in the slightest way, we feel some kind of mismatch.

Adding conversational interaction to the site is also a way to restrict access. This is a fun experiment, but it only uses the potential of the interactive user interface.

When messaging services such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Line, and others begin to integrate better with third-party services, they will be able to make our daily interactions significantly more valuable. And this is without the need to install another application.

Creating interactive interfaces is not only associated with a large number of technological problems, it also has many social difficulties. Our responsibility as developers is to solve this part of the problem.

The future of conversational interfaces is not in “bubbles” for text inserts. It is in the seamlessly built-in extensive interactions that introduce third-party services and content into our everyday tools.

Therefore, let's begin to think about what will happen after the rectangle, the grid, and even the “bubble”.

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