If you think conversation design is complex, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Where we’re heading is for a user to use whatever device or interface is the right device or interface at the time for whatever it is that they need. We’ve been talking about this since the beginning of 2018 with Matt Hartman.
That might be conversational, might be touch and swipe screen-based, it all depends.
And so designing conversations is going to become about designing the right kind of conversation for the right device type and the right environment that our user is in. We spoke about this at length with Google’s Daniel Padgett.
If I’m out and about wearing headphones, I might want something brief. If I’m sitting at home watching TV, I’ve got a bit more time. I might want something a bit more involved.
And so we’re going to start seeing conversations differ depending on the environment the user is in.
We’re already seeing tools that allow conversations to be designed more effectively, like Alexa conversations, but we’re not yet seeing tools that will take environment and device type and physical location into context.
And so I’m excited to see that coming fairly soon (I hope).
So if you think conversation design is complex, it’s going to get more complex before I gets simpler.