Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

The first link is showing 404.

Remove the (oddly added) trailing

Is it just me or did whatever text you added at the end of this cause the "reply" link to become italicized?

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)

Fixed. Thanks.

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