Breaking The Fourth Wall In Software

Alex Bunardzic, February 24, 2016

https://twitter.com/alexbunardzichttps://medium.com/@alexbunardzic

Or, Everything Old Is New Again

Early Human-Computer Interfaces

Intimidating

Clunky

Breakthrough-- Text!

Text Is Intuitive

But Computers Are Clunky

Only These People Knew How To Talk To Computers

Replace Text With Graphical Interface:The Desktop Metaphor

Quickly Mushroomed Into Scary GUI:Counter-Intuitive

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

People Find GUIs Frustrating

GUIs Enforce The ‘One Size Fits All’ Solutions

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

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

So GUIs Are The Training Wheels, Crutches And Wheelchairs

Can't Get Far Using Training Wheels

How To Remove Training Wheels And Learn To Ride Properly?

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

How Can We Do That?

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

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

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

OK, So What Did Just Happen Here?

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

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

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

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

We /invite it to our channel

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

The Bot Is The Buffer

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

Is This A Revolutionary Change?

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

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

Funny, Ha?

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

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

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

Microcopy

What Is Microcopy?

Customer Service-Oriented

Remove Graphical Decorations And You’re Left With A Conversational Thread Between A User

And A Back-end Service

Conversational Commerce

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)

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

Trends

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

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

“We’re just getting people used to the idea that you can message more than just people on Messenger.”

Seth Rosenberg, Facebook Product Manager

The Disappearance Of Flip Phones

The Disappearance Of Phone Numbers

Discussion Threads Are The New Apps

One Stop Shop - Discussion Thread Gives The Context

No Need To Jump Around From One App To Another

Establish Our Very Own Social Handshake

Nothing to install, nothing to configure—just flow

Conclusion

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