Future Talk: Here's why Chatbots are the future of App Design

Talking to your phone is just a bliss right ? You get all the information you need, and it saves so much time.

Okay, it's not all perfect, but consider this right ? Remember the days when someone asks you to make note of something, and you had to run through 3 parallel universes, just to get hold of a piece of paper, and a pencil with a broken tip. Now, the cool kids say "we've an app for that".



Apps have made phones, just as productive as the PC, and most people have stopped spending on PCs as well, their phones are doing just about everything they'll ever need.

Here's where the problem started...

 Every app has it's own design, just have a look at the 2 apps on the right, the 1st (from the left) is Lyft, and then other one is for Uber, both of them allow you to request a cab. So, they've the same functionality overall, but just look at the way their interfaces are laid out, the buttons, the menus, the search box everything. One would expect 2 apps with similar functionality to be quite similar right ? While it's not a bad thing to have different looking user interfaces, remember, many companies have their own 'design languages' like Google's Material Design, or Microsoft's Fluent Design System. All technicalities aside, it's basically a set of rules that one can follow to make the best user interface according to the company that came up with them. Lots of research, reviews and reiteration goes into these. One set of users might find one design language favorable over the other. So depending on the target audience demographic, the development team implements the design language that best suites them.

But, for the average everyday user, who might not open the app everyday, or may not fit into the demographics covered by the teams during design, the design can be a miss. Just try having those in your house try out your favorite app, and see how fast they can get things done.

Grandpa doesn't like the metric loads of options Facebook has to offer, to write up one post, they might seem quite overwhelming. So he'd prefer Twitter, as it's basically type and post, but to the teen in the house, all those options that Facebook has to offer are much more important than simplicity. This is where businesses run into problems.

This is when you begin wondering why no one has come up with a design language that appeals to everyone 🤔. As simple as that sounds to be the obvious answer, sadly it's not that easy. To arrive at such a design, you'd basically have to take every single person's opinion into account when designing it. Material Design, Fluent Design System and many other design languages have tried doing the same, to go as broad as possible, but it's just too hard.

Suddenly, some people came up with a bright idea 💡!

Just get rid of all the user interface and roll back to something like the terminal, which'd be like a one stop to everything you need, no more digging through sub-menus! Genius isn't it ?

Well, unlike the DOS days, you won't have to type in cryptic commands with dashes and slashes and what not to get things done... Just the language you speak!

Enter Chatbots, applications that you can have conversations with and get things done. Be it through voice or text.

Now developers can finally focus on the actual stuff that makes their app worthwhile, instead of crying over poor design choices, and the user can get things done in a snap!

Oh and also, now you can finally sound like Tony Stark 😎!