Have you ever worked in a corporation? Do you really think that Windows 8 UI was the fruit of years of careful design? What about Workday?
> but it is bizarre that so many businesses seem to be discarding battle tested UXes for chatbots
Not really. If the chatbot is smart enough then chatbot is the more natural interface. I've seen people who prefer to say "hey siri set alarm clock for 10 AM" rather than use the UI. Which makes sense, because language is the way people literally have evolved specialized organs for. If anything, language is the "battle tested UX", and the other stuff is temporary fad.
Of course the problem is that most chatbots aren't smart. But this is a purely technical problem that can be solved within foreseeable future.
It's quicker that way. Other things, such as zooming in to an image, are quicker with a GUI. Bladerunner makes clear how the voice UI is poor for this compared to a GUI.
Imagine going to a shop and browsing all the aisles vs talking to the store employee. Chatbot is like the latter, but for a webshop.
Not to mention that most webshops have their categories completely disorganized, making "search by constraints" impossible.
Also, the chatbot is just not going to have enough context, at least not in it's current state. Why those measurements? Because that's how much room you have, you measured. Why black? Because your couch is black too (bad choice), and you're trying to do a theme.
That's kind of a lot to explain.
I don't think it's necessary to resort to evolutionary-biology explanations for that.
When I use voice to set my alarm, it's usually because my phone isn't in my hand. Maybe it's across the room from me. And speaking to it is more efficient than walking over to it, picking it up, and navigating to the alarm-setting UI. A voice command is a more streamlined UI for that specific task than a GUI is.
I don't think that example says much about chatbots, really, because the value is mostly the hands-free aspect, not the speak-it-in-English aspect.
Most of the practical day to day tasks on the Androids I've used are 5-10 taps away from a lock screen, and get far less dirty looks from those around me.
If I use the touchscreen I have to:
1 unlock the phone - easy, but takes an active swipe
2 go to the clock app - i might not have been on the home screen, maybe a swipe or two to get there
3 set the timer to what I want - and here it COMPLETELY falls down, since it probably is showing how long the last timer I set was, and if that's not what I want, I have to fiddle with it.
If I do it with my voice I don't even have to look away from what I'm currently doing. AND I can say "90 seconds" or "10 minutes" or "3 hours" or even (at least on an iPhone) "set a timer for 3PM" and it will set it to what I say without me having to select numbers on a touchscreen.
And 95% of the time there's nobody around who's gonna give me a dirty look for it.
I don’t know any people that do Siri except the people that have really bad eyes
I do that all the time with Siri for setting alarms and timers. Certain things have extremely simple speech interfaces. And we've already found a ton of them over the last decade+. If it was useful to use speech for ordering an uber, it would've been worth it for me to learn the specific syntax Alexa wanted.
Do I want to talk to a chatbot to get a detailed table of potential flight and hotel options? Hell no. It doesn't matter how smart it is, I want to see them on a map and be able to hover, click into them, etc. Speech would be slow and awful for that.
Ah yes, it's just a small detail. Don't worry about it.
