Today’s UI design theme is a messaging app. This has become a very interesting topic since the chatbot concept has become such a hype.
Messaging with a chatbot was what we were trying to do for one of our own products. Unfortunately, it looks like it’s still too early for natural language processing technology, so conversing with a chatbot can’t be as smooth as it is with a human. I wish it will get there some day. However, I kinda have this worry that once you converse with a chatbot just like with a human, which means we will be able to replicate how human brain functions, I’m not sure what will happen in this world.
Anyway, I didn’t have time to draw the UI on computer, so I sketched it out. In my imaginative message app, a user just told the chatbot that she wanted to buy a jacket, and told it what aspects were important to her. The bot was just showing her a few jacket options, sorted by highest match to lowest. I sketched out two ways to see jacket details. However, to be honest, I’m not quite satisfied with either. One big problem we were not able to solve was that there was no straightforward way for people to compare jackets at a glance, and it seems, hmm, still a hard issue with limited screen space. How well the comparison can be also depends on the data mining depth for the jackets, so it’s not just UI or design only.
