Latest trends indicate that more people tend to spend time on messaging platforms than on traditional social network sites and apps. Chatting with friends/family/coworkers is now expanding to also chatting with online business. Chatbots play central role in this brave new world of text-based conversational commerce.

1. Breaking The Fourth Wall In
Software
Alex Bunardzic, February 24, 2016
https://twitter.com/alexbunardzic
https://medium.com/@alexbunardzic

2. Or, Everything Old Is New Again

4. Early Human-Computer Interfaces

5. Intimidating

6. Clunky

7. Breakthrough-- Text!

8. Text Is Intuitive

9. But Computers Are Clunky

10. Only These People Knew How To Talk
To Computers

11. Replace Text With Graphical Interface:
The Desktop Metaphor

12. Quickly Mushroomed Into Scary GUI:
Counter-Intuitive

13. Picture Is Worth A 1,000 Words, But
Most Of Those 'Words' Are Gibberish

14. People Find GUIs Frustrating

15. GUIs Enforce The ‘One Size Fits
All’ Solutions

16. What If, Instead Of Intermediary
Graphics, We Were To Use Plain Text
Again?

17. Yes, But Computers Are Brittle And
Will Not Be As Forgiving As GUIs

18. So GUIs Are The Training Wheels,
Crutches And Wheelchairs

19. Can't Get Far Using Training Wheels

20. How To Remove Training Wheels
And Learn To Ride Properly?

21. Break The Fourth Wall! (i.e. Stop
Pushing Pixels!)

22. How Can We Do That?

23. Example
• Say we order something online
• The next week we may be wondering about
the status of our order (hasn’t arrived yet)
• We open a browser, go to the online store, log
in, try to navigate to the order status page
• We have to wade through the jungle of
confusing menus, layouts, links etc. that keep
changing constantly

24. Less Frustrating Example
• What if, instead of doing all of the above
gymnastics, we just do the following
• Go to the command line (Messenger or Slack
etc.) and type:
• ‘@merchant_name what’s the status of my
order?’
• Let the merchant service (i.e. Amazon or Etsy
etc.) do the legwork for us

25. Guess What? We Just Broke The
Fourth Wall In Software!

26. OK, So What Did Just Happen
Here?

27. We Have Abandoned The GUI And
Switched To Plain Text When
Interacting With E-Commerce

28. But At The Same Token, We Didn’t
Have To Undergo Any Training

29. It Was All Made Possible Thanks To
Getting In Touch With A
Sophisticated Chat Bot

30. How Do We Get Involved With A
Chat Bot Of Our Choice?

31. We /invite it to our channel

32. Once Invited, The Bot Is Always
Online, Listening For Its Name To
Get Mentioned

33. The Bot Is The Buffer

34. The Bot Is Attentive To Human
Needs And Sensitive To Human
Frailty

35. Is This A Revolutionary Change?

36. No, Not Really. It’s More Of A
Natural Evolution In The Human-
Computer Interaction

37. In Actuality, It’s Not All That
Different From GUIs

38. Funny, Ha?

39. Let’s Examine What Goes On In A
Typical GUI Interface
• A user is presented with an Input field on the
form
• This Input field is sometimes referred to as a
Text Box
• The GUI listens to the user’s gestures and
catches the ‘send’ or ‘submit’ gesture
• The GUI then sends text to the back end
service layer

40. So GUIs Are Also Text-Driven
• Where do pixels come into play?
• They’re being used as mere decoration
• Often times pixels are used to sugar-coat the
web form and present it in a more familiar
context
• Typically, emulating a paper form
• Plus, it gives graphic designers the chance to
show off their chops

41. Remove The Pixelated Decorations,
And What Are You Left With?

42. Microcopy

43. What Is Microcopy?

44. Customer Service-Oriented

45. Remove Graphical Decorations And
You’re Left With A Conversational
Thread Between A User And A Back-
end Service

46. Conversational Commerce

47. What Are The Advantages Of
Conversational Interfaces?
• Intuitive
• Sensitive to human frailty (the bot will try to
clarify its master’s requests if at first not
understood)
• Familiar (everyone’s already fully accustomed to
chatting with family/friends/coworkers)
• Consistent experience across all possible devices
• Forever recorded in the fully personalized
discussion thread (full auditability)

48. Conversational Interface Offers
Experience Uncannily Similar To Everyday
Customer Support
• What does typically happen when calling
customer support and not being able to
resolve the issue?
• The issue gets escalated to the supervisor
• Same thing happens with chatbots
• When in doubt, they escalate the
question/issue to human customer support
workforce

49. Trends

52. On the web, keyword search was
the core of the experience

53. But on mobile, it’s become clear that
chat is where people spend most of
their time

54. “We’re just getting people used to
the idea that you can message more
than just people on Messenger.”
Seth Rosenberg, Facebook Product
Manager

55. The Disappearance Of Flip
Phones

56. The Disappearance Of Phone
Numbers

57. Discussion Threads Are The New
Apps

58. One Stop Shop - Discussion
Thread Gives The Context

59. No Need To Jump Around From
One App To Another

60. Establish Our Very Own Social
Handshake

61. Nothing to install, nothing to
configure—just flow

62. Conclusion

63. We’re Leaving The World Of Scarcity
And Entering The World Of
Abundance