News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform by jeswin on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @09:49AM (#15593184)
Last year, we had built almost the same thing. It's Open Source but unfortunately, haven't added any documentation (will do when I get time) - https://github.com/yak-ai/wild-yak

Lessons learnt:

- Works much better than AI driven bots at the moment

- Don't pretend to do intelligent things. Be just a dumb textbot.

- Force people into selecting options as much as you can

- When accepting data as text, give an example of what they should type

- Fancy Cards and Carousels are crappy UX. Stick to text.

- Super powerful when exposed to semi-technical users. Basically CLI for non-computer folks.

- An effective UI pattern for desktop usecases is to have a messenger pane on the left (or right), and a larger details window next to it. eg: You could say- tickets to Tokyo, and the right pane would display a bunch of options.

Re:Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform by real-hacker on Sunday November 05, 2017 @09:45AM (#15629610)
Totally agree about the value of user interaction with pure text.

We are too obsessed about UI widgets, but forgot one thing: the screen space is just 2D, you cannot put too many things in the 2D space, so we introduce levels, but lower-level interactions are often neglected by users, a dilemma.

But with dialog-style UI, we introduce the extra dimension of time. When we distribute user interactions on the time dimension, sometimes limited screen space is no longer a problem.

Re:Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform by mtthwmtthw on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @08:19AM (#15600471)
I don’t agree with your comment about “sticking to text”. Visual components make sense for form filling type transactions, presenting image/text combos like articles, and guiding the user through explicit follow up actions.
Re:Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform by LiweiZ on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @11:20AM (#15593853)
The first link is showing 404.
Re:Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform by emilfihlman on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @11:46AM (#15594069)
Remove the (oddly added) trailing
Re:Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform by dopamean on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @03:29PM (#15595857)
Is it just me or did whatever text you added at the end of this cause the "reply" link to become italicized?
Re:Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform by detaro on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @03:31PM (#15595868)
Not just you. in the right edge case, open italicization at the end of a comment can cause that in at least some browsers. (I found this a few months back and told the mods, and if I remember right it didn't happen in their browser so there was some confusion at first)
Re:Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform by jeswin on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @11:41AM (#15594024)
Fixed. Thanks.