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Comment by thrav | Hacker News Reader

Because the ChatBot squashes all those different pages and forms into one location. It takes the time and mental load of trying to locate features on the site or app off of me.

Instead of navigating through 3 links to reach the form, having to search the newly loaded page each time, I answer 3 questions.

In truth, I just type “ATM withdrawal limit” and the form begins, because it’s so obvious what I’m trying to do.

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Once you’ve got something down to muscle memory it really doesn’t matter how it works so long as it stays the same, I guess. I feel like these things are a speed bump when I run into them though. I recently canceled a my service with a utility. Instead of a simple form to select a date to shut off service, provide a new mailing address, and a submit button, I had to go through this artificial “dialog” with a robot. What if I made a typo in the date? How do I go back and fix it? Restart the whole thing? Try magical NLP strings like “change cancelation date” and see what happens? It just feels like a step backward to funnel interactions that used to be carried out using a rich UI through a chat dialog. I wonder how this affects usability for blind or mobility impaired people too. It might be better for them, idk.

Chat dialog interfaces can be cool as a way to piggyback a service through existing chat services. I used to love goog411 back in the SMS era. But I don’t want everything I do with a computer reduced down to a fake chat with a robot.

As an example, I just needed the routing number for my account to make a payment. I was like, “shit, where is that in the app again”, but had just made this comment, so I hit help, and typed “routing number”, and it immediately responded with the routing number in big bold letters. (https://imgur.com/a/raXEyO3)

The point is to eliminate the need to work to find stuff.

And I just typed “USAA routing number” into google and got the same result. I’m not opposed to having searchable customer support for this kind of information, I just don’t like going through the clumsy dialog charade to accomplish common tasks that require input of data.

Obviously that example can be replicated in a Google search, but that doesn’t invalidate the value of the same concept applied to protected information.

Again, not against having fake robot chat as a an add-on to help surface context-specific information, or even complete complex tasks if you prefer to do so, but to me it feels like a step backwards if it _replaces_ traditional HCI. It feels like the reverse of when we went from navigating phone trees and talking to humans to using a website to do a simple task like "change my mailing address." The advent of being able to do those kind of things online was what drew me to online banks like Ally over traditional banks. It's so much more efficient. Now it feels like things are regressing back to awkward synchronous interactions, sometimes complete with artificial pauses and "typing" bubbles to make it feel more human. Too bad the agent you're interacting with is too dumb to let you correct simple typos without having to figure out how to re-enter whatever process you're in.

We have sophisticated data inputs that we've developed for decades. Tons of usability and accessibility thought has gone into things like how someone can select a date, or input a number. Throwing all that away for a dumb NLP chatbot because "Wow! AI!" is a shame. Tack on a glorified search interface that looks like a support rep with an IQ of like 20 if you like, but please don't funnel me into it when I'm already on your site or app and I've purposefully selected a menu item like "close my account."

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