Chatbot UI ideas

Everyone and their mother has opinions about chatbots. I don't see them as being much different from search engines, except, whereas a search engine will present to you an impartial set of links that 1. contradict one another and 2. contain your query and a whole bunch of other information, the chatbot will make some attempt to resolve the contradictions (maybe arbitrarily, but the internet has always been somewhat arbitrary) and provide you the direct response to your query. Ergo, I don't have to spend all my time parsing through information and spend more of my time intaking information; I can resolve the chatbot's BS on my own time. Technology!

In the course of using chatbots I found the vertical design to frustrate any kind of complex thinking. And so, I drafted these designs not to be the end of the conversation but as ideas of how to shape information going forward.

Tree

Very quickly I found the chatbot's vertical design to be limiting for any technical interrogation. Sometimes the response to a question inspired more questions, and in the course of asking questions the bot would make assumptions about my queries when, in fact, I am just asking questions and putting out hypothetical scenarios.

I developed the Tree for just this purpose: interrogation.

Journal

In developing the ideas of psychotherapy, Freud demonstrates very early that the patient's cognitive distress is not like a disease, which can be palliated with medicine. A patient has to "cure" themselves - they must have a revelation concerning their own thoughts; the therapist is merely an aide to help the patient look at their own way of thinking in an external sense.

I began recording a dream journal and found a chatbot was quite useful in discovering dream interpretations, because there is no such thing as correctness when it comes to dream interpretation, unless the patient deems it to be correct. As a result, I developed this kind of bot.

Click on the edges of the component to flip pages.

Form

This is an odd one: a friend of mine wanted to build a New Year's Resolution app. While brainstorming for ways to make it work, I developed this prototype to simplify the user shaping their needs into a prompt.

This would work just as well for a study plan or reading goal or whatever.

Honestly, I don't know if this is actually useful, but this is within the lens of myself.

Basic chatbot

Finally, if we must live with the vertical chatbot, there might as well be a table-of-contents so I can easily get back to old queries.