How chatbots factor into the future of mobile UX design

As mobile technology has expanded and evolved, the best practices for reaching customers on mobile platforms have evolved with them. Users’ behaviors on mobile have changed, and their expectations for what a brand’s app should offer them have changed as well. New technologies and user experience techniques have emerged to address customers’ evolving needs, and we’ve identified a few new tactics that can help brands’ apps and mobile experiences feel fresh and engaging in an industry that never ceases to innovate.

Say good-bye to G-U-I

One of the biggest transformations in how people interact with computers was the graphical user interface (GUI), which replaced the command-line interfaces of the 1980s with dynamic and visual user interfaces populated by buttons and windows. The change was intended to bring digital experiences closer to our experience in the real world, which is filled with physical objects that represent our work and play spaces.

But as computers become more powerful, and the services that run on them become more sophisticated, new interface paradigms are necessary for humans to more closely relate to the digital experiences in our lives. This is where bots come in—a new way to interface with computers that more nearly approximates the experience of interfacing with a friend.

Chat bots are web-assisted programs that allow users to perform actions or get information that would have traditionally required opening an app or navigating to a website. Need the weather? Shoot off a chat message to a Slack bot and get an immediate response. Want to shop for new clothes? Ping a Messenger bot for images and prices from your favorite store. Put simply, bots represent a way to perform the same actions we’re accustomed to on mobile devices in a new way, a way that’s more intuitive and expressive than ever before.

Bots perform the same actions we’re used to on mobile devices in a new way—a way that’s more intuitive and expressive than ever before.

This approach works because technologies exist to understand users in natural language, allowing anyone to compose requests and have the computer understand them. Whereas app user experiences before mandated that users engage with them on the apps’ terms—having static buttons and a limited set of input options—chat interfaces and natural language processing allow users to engage with apps on their own terms, choosing how they express their requests from within their natural speaking style and using their own language.

Just as the GUI’s “desktop metaphor” helped bring an increased level of familiarity to digital experiences in the 1980s, so too do bots bring an increased level of familiarity and comfort to engaging with digital systems in 2016. Billions of people chat with friends and loved ones on their mobile devices, sending trillions of texts and iMessages and WhatsApp messages every day. It’s a natural extension that they would begin chatting with their mobile apps, too.

Going forward, this new experience will evolve to support voice input, and products like Amazon Echo and Google Home are the first players in this new category. The closer to ordinary life that a digital experience can feel, the better—asking Siri about the weather will be the modern equivalent of having “folders” on your “desktop.”

Design your app for micro-interactions

Despite their perceived popularity and ubiquity, the reality is that many mobile apps aren’t used as often as many brands would like—if at all. According to Think with Google, most mobile users only ever download around 36 apps in total—and of those, only about 12 apps actually become an integral part of their daily lives. Once you control for ubiquitous apps like Facebook and Uber, the opportunity space for new third-party apps can seem distressingly slim.

But the opportunity on mobile is still massive, and apps that are optimized for users’ behavioral patterns still have ample room to make an impact. The key is to recognize the limits of users’ attentions, and to design experience that maximize the short attention span of today’s mobile user. While on desktop experiences users expect to spend 2–3 minutes to finish engaging with an experience—from first loading the website through completing a task—the expectation for a similar task on mobile is less than 50 seconds.

Mobile experiences, therefore, need to be designed for the type of lightweight interactions that users prefer—a trend that has come to be known as “mobile micro moments.” The more information and utility an app can pack into a short, lightweight interaction, the more likely it is to be adopted and adored by users.

The more functionality an app can back into a few seconds of interactions, the more likely it is to become part of users’ daily routines.

Considering how—and when—information is presented to users is paramount to delivering an efficient and quick-to-use experience. Apps should identify what their core use case is—a task most easily solved with user testing—and make that central task the first and easiest thing users can do within the app. For banking apps, this might be something as basic as checking balances. For shopping apps, it could take the form of a one-step “re-order” button. Whatever it is, if that core use case happens to align with the brand’s business drivers and KPIs, even better.

Beyond optimizing the interactions within the app is only one tactic, because both the iOS and Android platforms offer mobile app developers a myriad of options to extend their utility outside the constraints of the app itself. With extensions across the operating systems, developers can introduce widgets and secondary views that allow users to engage with their content in quicker or more accessible ways.

Among these are notifications, one of the most common communication tools that developers and brands use to reach their apps’ audiences. Notifications on both iOS and Android can be interactive, offering a level of interaction from the phone’s lock screen or from within another app. Users can perform quick actions or receive updates about in-app content from wherever they are, and all they need to do is toggle notifications on.

Finally, the landscape for micro moment mobile experiences is evolving beyond the narrow context of mobile devices themselves, as wearable platforms from all the major mobile players begin to make their mark. watchOS on Apple Watch and Android Wear on a myriad of devices make it possible to extend the brand app experience to a new, more accessible, and more personal screen than ever—one constantly attached to users’ wrists. These platforms are designed with micro-moment–style interactions in mind, and can be used to great effect to maximize the subtlest of glances users make toward their wrists.

Apps on tap—but with zero taps

Perhaps the biggest barrier preventing users from downloading and installing native apps on their devices is just that—the downloading and installing part. Many users don’t want to go through the time and effort to find a mobile app, download it to their space-constrained mobile device, and keep it on their home screen among a constellation of other apps. But what if there were easier ways for users to access and take advantage of native app capabilities—maybe without downloading the app at all?

A recent trend in native app architecture has prioritized modularity, breaking the app codebase itself into distinct units that can be delivered to the user on demand. This is an emerging trend, only being introduced in the past 9 months, that points at a mobile future where native apps are significantly less resource-hungry and just as accessible as, if not more accessible than, mobile websites.

The first of these technologies is App Thinning, a set of features in iOS 9 that are designed to minimize the size and impact of apps from the App Store. One of these features is called Slicing, which allows third-party mobile developers to specify which parts of their apps need to be downloaded for various device types. Why should an iPhone SE user need to download and install code and assets designed for the larger iPhone 6s Plus? Why would an iPad user need to download a universal app binary containing code designed for iPhone that will never run? Slicing requires a bit more organization on the iOS developer’s end, but pays off in spades by drastically reducing the size of apps that need to be downloaded.

Why should iPhone SE users need to download code and assets designed for iPad?

The second part of App Thinning that’s relevant to most developers is On-Demand Resources, which changes how the app is downloaded to give new users the quickest initial download experience possible. On-Demand Resources allows developers to specify which parts of their app are essential for the first run, and which can be downloaded later. This means that users could download a new game from the App Store and effectively only download the first level—levels 2, 3, and 4 can be downloaded on demand as soon as users need them. This minimizes the amount of content that needs to be included in the first installation and allows for a more dynamic and personalized content experience for users.

Finally, Google this year previewed a new Android technology that takes these themes a step further, called Android Instant Apps. As the name implies, Instant Apps reduces the amount of time necessary for users to find and download an app to effectively zero, leveraging URL association to dynamically download a portion of an Android app from the Google Play Store. Android developers can specify which parts of their app are relevant to user tasks—say, the purchase flow of an ecommerce app once a user clicks a deep link to a product. Users can click links sent to them via text messages or email and instantly see the content within a native app—but just the part of the native app they need for that experience.

Instant Apps fundamentally changes how apps operate on the Android platform, and requires a great deal of planning and consideration from Android app developers. The number of contexts that Android apps need to support is increased exponentially, and the various portions of the apps that users might download on demand need to be architected to operate independently of one another. But even with this extra effort, the boon of Instant Apps is instant discoverability—users can begin using an Android app without having to search for it, find it in the Play Store, or even download it.

Conclusion

Native app developers for iOS and Android are adapting to users’ evolving needs, changing everything from the experience users have with the app to the way code is organized to better address users’ priorities and contexts. Over time, the idea of what “apps” are will expand and contract to reflect the new and different ways that people are using their smartphones, and will begin to blur the defining lines between technologies and experiences. What can a gorgeous user interface do that a bot couldn’t? Why should there be any clicks between an app’s launch screen and the content users want? And, come to think of it, why should users need to download an app at all?

These foundational questions are driving innovation into native app development that is redefining what it means to build software for mobile. Apps today are worlds apart from the apps that debuted on the App Store in 2008. In the next 8 years, we should expect this dramatic evolution of strategy and contexts to only accelerate.