[wutbrodo]

It's something I personally find very bizarre, but I've definitely noticed that a lot of people have a very strong mental block about doing things on a computer, or even a browser. These tasks instantly seem 10x more daunting, and people feel like they can mess it up easily. Chat interfaces that are thin wrappers over web forms don't provide any actual functional value, but on the basis of these observations I could understand them helping with people's feelings of being "overwhelmed by the system".

[cordite]

It likely gives end users a sense of itemized reward. Rather than showing a vast huge form, or even a progress bar, a chat bot can choose what next to prioritize and present. Not all parts of a form may be applicable, showing what is needed and letting the end user continue at their leisure reduces stress and cognitive overhead. The above is likely why tax companies have been doing better as of late when it comes to completing tax forms.

[problems]

See - I have the opposite issue, if I'm using a computer I want the information on a webpage or form, if it's not then I want to call and talk to someone - never a machine. If I'm interacting with a system, I want to interact with the system as directly as possible - if I'm interacting with a human, I want to interact with the human as directly as possible. Talking to a machine is a terrible UI in my experience.

[wutbrodo]

Yea I agree, I don't have whatever hangup those people do: what I prefer to use lines up pretty comprehensibly with what's most efficient. I recently took an extended sabbatical and went backpacking and took along a small laptop. Almost universally, people who saw me on it assumed I was working. All of these people were _aware_ that you can do almost anything on a laptop that you can do on a smartphone, but for some reason everyone maps phone to leisure and computers to work. Web seems to fall into a similar category (regardless of the platform); people find it intimidating I guess.

In this case, I'm sure people would prefer answering these questions directly to a person, but that's obviously way higher cost and the point of this system is that you don't have to hire a lawyer. Given that direct human conversation isn't an option, and given the evidently common aversion to normal web interfaces, I'm not particularly surprised that some people might find this valuable.

[r00fus]

So it's like a 90's-esque UI wizard?

[elastic_church]

before you know it we're going to be using chatrooms with pound signs for each channel and addressing users with @ symbols again

at least I don't have to wait for the mod to +v me. we'll have a chatbot for that

[vertex-four]

You should check out Matrix[0]. :)

[0] https://matrix.org

[elastic_church]

hm, I wonder if they allow custom URIs, I'd like to change mine Freenode

[tedunangst]

Exactly. It had less "chatbot" functionality than zork did.