Let’s Talk UX – Designing using Conversations as Templates

“What’s the deal with this thing?”
“It’s telling me to press this button”
“I think it hates me”
“Come see what it wants from me”

Why do we treat digital interfaces like they’re sentient beings who are communicating with us knowingly and emotionally? Because our brain is trying to reserve energy, and therefore puts everything into known templates. This is a process known as ‘Predictive Coding’. Magicians, stand up comics and crooks all take advantage of it (cutting it off at just the right moment) to catch us by surprise.

The ‘Conversation’ thinking template is one of the oldest and most familiar ones to our brain, which is why it’s easy to take an interaction between a machine and a human and insert it into it. This template comes with the assumption that the entity we’re communicating with is sentient. We humanize it (humanizing has other characteristics, such as distribution of responsibilities, the structuring of logic, the feeling of participation etc’).

So what is this tangent for?

[I summarized this subject quite a bit, but it is truly a fascinating topic to delve into, so if you’re curious to read more about it, I left a list of recommendations for you at the end of the article]
If our brain interprets these sorts of interactions as conversations, then why shouldn’t we design our digital tools accordingly? To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you should design pages with sections upon sections of text, or that you should create websites that look like chat logs. What I’m suggesting is that we should plan usage processes that support the conversation template. In websites that would most likely be conversations of persuasion or sales, and in digital tools the conversation would be about cooperation and offering some form of service.

So what is a conversation?

There are plenty of conversation types. After all, we don’t behave the same way in a conversation with a good friend that we see everyday as we do in a conversation with a representative of a rigid bureaucratic establishment, or with a sales representative of a product we aren’t sure we want to purchase.

But they all share the same base assumptions:

A conversation has a goal.
It has a beginning and an end
[introduction, middle section and a conclusion].
Both sides react and reply to whatever the other side is saying and stay faithful to the subject of the conversation, although sometimes a conversation may veer off track.
The conversation is influenced by what’s being said, and what isn’t being said (body language, tone of voice etc’).

Ok, so what do we do with all this information now?

We plan.

There are three variables involved in this conversation – the user, ourselves, and the platform.

We need to understand each of them as much as we can, so that we can plan out the conversation in an optimal way.

I know that many spiritual schools of thought want you to ‘know yourself before knowing others’, but this time we’re going to get to know who’s standing in front of us, who we are speaking with. Here are some questions that we can ask to help us figure that out:

In what sort of state is the person in when they reach out to us? Are they alone? What is the time of day? What stage of deliberation are they on concerning the subject that they reached out to us about?
Does the person have a lot of time? True, this is relative, but relative to the process the conversation is about – are they pressed for time or do we have the option to expand and elaborate?
What do they know about us or the subject? Can we forgo explaining the basics? How professional or personal does our language need to be so they can understand us best?
What are they expecting out of this interaction? Are they interested in knowledge, a product, or a service? Are they just browsing?
What is the nature of the relationship between us and the user? Are they an old customer, or someone who has just learned about us?
What made the user start a conversation with us? What is the thing that happened that made the user initiate the conversation? In most cases it’s a problem, but sometimes it can be curiosity as well.

Now that we understand the other side, let’s see what we can bring to the conversation, and just as important – what we want to get out of it.

What do we want to leave this conversation with? It’s true we can be complex and have many things that we want, but let’s try to stick to this specific conversation. Are we hoping to get a sale? To get a lead? Shares? Awareness? To change someone’s mind?
What should we share about ourselves? Which of the things we could say about ourselves should we choose to share? We could share everything, but that will most likely deter and bore our conversation partner.
How should we present ourselves? The ‘how’ is just as important as the ‘what’. What sort of persona should we choose? We do this all the time in real life as well – we behave differently when we’re talking with a client, a good friend, a stranger or our mother.

Now, after we’ve decided who we’re conversing with and how, it’s time to find the fitting technology for the kind of conversation that we want to have. These days, the number of options we have and the platforms we can choose from is huge and growing bigger with every passing day.

Here are some guidelines that will help us avoid getting lost:

Be where your users are. It isn’t advisable to try to get your users to change their habits in any meaningful capacity, or force them to learn a new language so that they can initiate a conversation with you. Instead, think about platforms they are familiar with and know their way around. The most common mistake is focusing on desktop, when the majority of the audience comes from mobile. This isn’t just about the screen size, it’s a different conversation entirely. Don’t take this as me saying that you shouldn’t try to innovate, all I’m saying is that you need certain a base criteria to succeed in that (an audience that isn’t afraid of changes, a company with a very well established brand etc’).
And more than anything else – meet your users as fast as you can. Don’t waste time and resources developing something highly complex, just to find out later that the market doesn’t have a need for it. You can always improve on things as you work, and it’s much better to keep an eye on the direction that the market is taking and take a similar approach.

Another possibility is to involve real users in the process of examining different solutions, and not waiting for the finished product to find out if things work in an optimal way.

In a nutshell

If you think of digital interactions (user experience) as conversations you can come to them more prepared.
This template is very familiar to us, and it doesn’t require much effort (in most cases). Get help from people who are more experienced than you for the type of conversations you want to have (Sales representatives for sales conversations, engineers for characterization conversations etc’).
A simple, fun way to practice this before talking to any real users is roleplay. Sit with someone and have the conversation you’d like to have with them. One will play the interface and one will play the user.
If you need any help with that, we’re here – and we’d love to join in on the conversation ;).