Conversational Design as a Route to Web Sustainability (and what you do before “Mobile First”
I’ve been reading a bit about Conversational Design, and want to suggest some talking points about its relation to web sustainability:
Conversational Design uses text interaction, which reduces the complexity of the Ui
Conversational Design may provide a more natural way of user interaction for many apps, currently download gobs of JavaScript to create an elaborate, animated visual Ui that uses lots of visual symbols instead of a few words
Conversational Design creates a dialogue between user and a “Site Persona”, which fits nicely into many Ux models. We’ve been calling these, “Design Personas”, as part of Emotional Design:
https://alistapart.com/article/crafting-a-design-persona
Conversational Design outputs a text stream ordered in time, which means you naturally support visually impaired uses with screen readers. In contrast, we need to put ARIA roles on visual pages to make sure they let screen readers parse content in the correct order
Conversational Design deliverables look a LOT like a Ux user storyboard, scenario, or Customer Journey.
Conversational Design supports those without visual screens, which includes IoT devices like Alexa. But it also supports, in theory “smart” web spiders and related AIs trying to make sense of a web page, if they can also engage in a dialogue with the Site Persona.
Conversational Design will be used heavily in VR and AR. The reason? VR and AR environments are too complex to control except via voice interaction.
So, I’m suggesting that instead of “Mobile First”, “Conversation First” as a new route to Web Sustainability. Thoughts?
