{"id":13649,"date":"2017-10-11T16:47:43","date_gmt":"2017-10-11T15:47:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.intercom.com\/?p=13649"},"modified":"2020-07-30T12:57:49","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T11:57:49","slug":"why-forms-arent-dead-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/why-forms-arent-dead-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"The cult of conversational design: why forms aren’t dead yet"},"content":{"rendered":"

2016 was the year of conversational<\/a> design.<\/p>\n

Everywhere we looked, conversational UIs were breaking out of messaging apps and into the products we use every day, from shoe shopping to cosmetics and everything in between.<\/p>\n

\"conversational<\/div>\n

Many of these were successful, but many others were not. Conversational UIs might mirror the way we naturally like to communicate<\/a>, but they actually required more mental load than traditional GUIs. If you\u2019re asking a user to engage in a conversation instead of tapping a button or two, are you really making things any easier? At times it felt like designers were blindly applying conversational UI to interaction design, problems that already have better, if less trendy, solutions.<\/p>\n

At Intercom, we\u2019re bullish on conversational interfaces, but as a hybrid model of interaction. When we built our live chat for sales solution<\/a> recently, rather than relying on text alone, we incorporated conversational design along with one of the least fashionable interfaces \u2013 a form. In this post, I\u2019ll go through the design considerations that led us to this hybrid interface.<\/p>\n

Figure out the problem first and the interface second<\/h2>\n

Our live chat for sales<\/a> tool is all about providing a personal, human selling experience to your website visitors. In order to do this, when someone lands on your website, your sales teams need to ask for some basic information through the messenger<\/a> in order to understand who they\u2019re talking to and how they can help.<\/p>\n

Collecting this information manually is a mundane and repetitive task for a sales team, so we decided to build a new skill for our bot, Operator<\/a>, which would automatically collect your user\u2019s information through the messenger on your website. Herein lies the challenge: how can we automatically collect this information in the simplest possible way for the end user?<\/p>\n

Exploration #1: Simple conversational UI ?<\/h2>\n

As Intercom is a messaging product, an obvious solution would be to rely solely on simple 1:1 conversational elements. Here\u2019s how it worked:<\/p>\n