Since Facebook launched their annual F8 conference for bot developers in 2016 and Microsoft followed suit, there's been a lot of hype, excitement and speculation around chatbots. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has stated that chatbots will "fundamentally revolutionize how computing is experienced", altering the way content and services are created and consumed on the web.
There are currently more than 100,000 bots and developers on the Messenger network alone. More than 10,000 businesses are already using or working on their own bots, and by 2020 80% businesses hope to have chatbots for interacting with customers.
In this article, I'll cover what chatbots are, the sudden boom in their popularity, how they are significantly changing the way we browse and interact with the web, why web developers and designers should care about this paradigm shift, and what they can specifically do to keep up.
What Chatbots Are
This Google Trends graph shows exponentially growing interest over time for "Chatbot" across Search:
By definition, chatbots are computer programs powered by machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) that anyone can interact with to get things done or find information and services. They primarily exists on messenger platforms like Facebook Messenger, Kik, Telegram, Slack, Skype and WeChat, which come with existing user bases.
Chatbots are smart, automated conversational identities that make tapping on drop-down menu buttons, opting for search functions and navigating through pages on websites redundant. They provide instant, specific results in a smooth-flowing conversational format.
How Bots Will Change Web Interactions
Current web interactions typically involve extensive Google searches, getting handed a bunch of search results, going through each till we find what we're looking for, and finally taking some kind of action.
With a bot, on the other hand, browsing and navigational elements get replaced by a straightforward Q&A-styled conversation.
For a better understanding of how exactly web interaction will change, let’s take any e-commerce website as an example.
Your end goal: you want to buy a nice blue shirt for a meeting but don’t want to spend more than $30.
Typically, you might go to an ecommerce website (say it's filledwithclothes.com): you hover over the categories on top, select men’s/women's shirts, and are led to another landing page … and that’s not even the half of it.
Now on the product listing page you’ll either set some filters to accommodate your budget and color preferences or you’ll skip that and start going through the shirts right away.
This is where you’ll need time and patience to go through all the options and arrive at one you like. You’ll check the size chart and maybe, just maybe, decide to make a purchase. After this, checkout and payment will lead you down another series of actions, until you’re finally done placing the order.
Replacing browsing and navigation with conversation
Now imagine that the same ecommerce website decides to get a chatbot (just as countless other brands like H&M, Tommy Hilfiger, Burberry and Sephora have done). Let's call it Clothes Bot. Ideally, they would place the bot where their audiences are, which would most likely be Facebook Messenger or their website landing pages.
Here's a mockup of an interaction with Clothes Bot:
As a user you, could talk to this bot to find products right from Facebook chat itself, almost like how you would message a friend.
Before I dive into explaining what developers and designers can do to be a part of the bot revolution, I’m going to go over why they should care in the first place, and what will specifically change in terms of development and design.
Why should developers and designers care about the bot era?
As of now, all the big players like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM and Amazon have released numerous, open-source bot building tools and frameworks to help developers create bots. They’ve also formed an AI initiative with the likes of Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Intel and Baidu to address ethical and privacy issues that might arise in the development and scaling stages.
Between 1.2 billion people use Facebook Messenger on a daily basis, and introducing bots to help businesses interact, market and sell to customers inside the same window presents a scope greater than apps did when they came around for the first time.
Users don’t need to download an app, but instead can use one umbrella app like Facebook, Kik, Telegram or any other independent chat-based platform, where there exist countless bots for people to search and talk to.
Kik hosts a Bot Shop with a variety of bots for its user base to search for and talk to. Slack provides a Brilliant Bots list to all its corporate accounts to increase productivity and get tasks done faster. The list goes on.
In essence, general web users can just search for the brand/company/service from their native messenger apps or the web and start chatting with their bot just like how they would chat with a friend on Messenger.
Early adopters in the tech space are backing the bot revolution. It's worth considering what this means for developers and designers. What will the web look like in the years to come, and how will bots shape it?
Could this be Web 3.0?
From mobile apps to addictive social networks, "Web 2.0" saw quite a few iconic developments such as video sharing sites (YouTube), blogs, wikis and RSS feeds (Feedly), collaborative consumption platforms (Craigslist, Uber). Currently, however, two intersecting trends have made the rise of chatbots a plausible next stage for the web:
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Mobile app fatigue. A large number of smartphone users download few or no apps per month. And with more than three million apps available on the two app stores, it’s getting harder for businesses to build unique apps and even harder to stand out midst the noise.
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Popularity of messenger platforms. For the first time ever, the big 4 messenger apps are seeing more MAUs (monthly active users) than the big 4 social networking platforms:
Users are clearly preferring instant and interactive interfaces. For businesses looking to target customers where they are, it makes sense to be active on a chat-based platform. And instead of asking a customer to jump from one landing page to another, they can bring all essential functions into the chat environment itself.
Here’s an overview of how conversation as a platform will change the different elements of an end-user interface:
Design implications
| Web Applications in 2017 | Web Applications in 2020 |
|---|---|
| Web pages | Bot URLs |
| Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) | Conversational User Interfaces(CUI) |
| Websites organized into sections for easier navigation | Q&A layout providing user-specific results, making navigation redundant |
| Drop-down menus | Suggestions or recommended buttons integrated into chat |
| Pop-ups and live chat services | All-in-one bot widget |
| Web Content and blog posts | Rich micro-content cards |
| E-commerce product pages | Product catalogue carousels in conversation |
Development implications
| Web Applications in 2017 | Web Applications in 2020 |
|---|---|
| JavaScript, HTML, CSS, back end | Natural Language Processing, Natural Language Understanding and Artificial Intelligence principles. Understanding of neural networks and regression patterns |
| Keyword based search | Context based interactions |
| Standalone app development | Integration with multiple messaging platforms |
| Static user experiences | Real-time experience |
Continue reading %Chat Bots and the Future of Web Development%
by Abhimanyu Godara via SitePoint
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