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Comment by omash | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain how the first chatbot was any better than an interactive form?

It's something I personally find very bizarre, but I've definitely noticed that a lot of people have a very strong mental block about doing things on a computer, or even a browser. These tasks instantly seem 10x more daunting, and people feel like they can mess it up easily. Chat interfaces that are thin wrappers over web forms don't provide any actual functional value, but on the basis of these observations I could understand them helping with people's feelings of being "overwhelmed by the system".

It likely gives end users a sense of itemized reward. Rather than showing a vast huge form, or even a progress bar, a chat bot can choose what next to prioritize and present. Not all parts of a form may be applicable, showing what is needed and letting the end user continue at their leisure reduces stress and cognitive overhead. The above is likely why tax companies have been doing better as of late when it comes to completing tax forms.

So it's like a 90's-esque UI wizard?

before you know it we're going to be using chatrooms with pound signs for each channel and addressing users with @ symbols again

at least I don't have to wait for the mod to +v me. we'll have a chatbot for that

You should check out Matrix[0]. :)

[0] https://matrix.org

hm, I wonder if they allow custom URIs, I'd like to change mine Freenode

Exactly. It had less "chatbot" functionality than zork did.

See - I have the opposite issue, if I'm using a computer I want the information on a webpage or form, if it's not then I want to call and talk to someone - never a machine. If I'm interacting with a system, I want to interact with the system as directly as possible - if I'm interacting with a human, I want to interact with the human as directly as possible. Talking to a machine is a terrible UI in my experience.

Yea I agree, I don't have whatever hangup those people do: what I prefer to use lines up pretty comprehensibly with what's most efficient. I recently took an extended sabbatical and went backpacking and took along a small laptop. Almost universally, people who saw me on it assumed I was working. All of these people were _aware_ that you can do almost anything on a laptop that you can do on a smartphone, but for some reason everyone maps phone to leisure and computers to work. Web seems to fall into a similar category (regardless of the platform); people find it intimidating I guess.

In this case, I'm sure people would prefer answering these questions directly to a person, but that's obviously way higher cost and the point of this system is that you don't have to hire a lawyer. Given that direct human conversation isn't an option, and given the evidently common aversion to normal web interfaces, I'm not particularly surprised that some people might find this valuable.

From a tech perspective? Likely none.

From a PR perspective, it would seem huge. I doubt he would have had a write up on the guardian or this much exposure on HN if it was a web form instead of a chat bot.

It should give us all some food for thought when we give consideration on how to market our work.

I'll add to what others have replied - there are literally billions of humans who have never filled out a web form, but are comfortable texting. Even tech-savvy people might even prefer doing things that way. Interface style is incredibly important from a user experience perspective and can mean the difference between people using the service and people not using it.

It seems that people are more willing to treat a computer they text with like its a confused person, and work through the troubles. When its a web form though, or an application, they're more likely to act as if the computer is malicious or as if it is mocking them for their ignorance.

Computers are closer to the first mental model than the last---they don't understand the full context of any situation, and when it comes to things like 'understanding' your typical app is programmed to a level less than the average 4 year old.

My guess is they did market research and concluded that this interface was somehow the one their target demographic preferred.

If I had an app to write and learned that customers were most likely to buy it with a UI that involved waving the phone and grunting at it, I'd just shrug and build it that way.

Here is how almost every government form in the UK works - long interactive form, mutiple pages of input. Then you get an error message at the end (or, sometimes you submit the form don't get an error message and then receive an error message in the post after 7/14 days). its easy to see how an interactive form that checks for consistency as it goes would win out!

I bet chatbots are more effective than forms. For a form to work, the user has to look around the page and figure out what to do. The chatbot is a back and forth discussion, but there's one place to look, and one question to answer.

It might not be as efficient for a user who has memorized keystrokes to work through, but more effective for first-time users.

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