Deep: The UX of new Conversational Features
Real world examples from Google Maps, Instacart, Fitbit, Spotify, Adobe and more. How top product teams are integrating conversational features.
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“The future is conversational”. At least, that’s what Microsoft’s CEO of AI Mustafa Suleyman believes. And to be fair to him, there’s plenty of evidence that he’s right.
Pinterest recently rolled out a new conversational feature that it says boosts the relevancy of on site search results by 30%. Their new Shopping Assistant lets users interact through a conversational interface to describe what they’d like to see and in many ways is the Spotify DJ for Pins.
In its latest earnings report, Spotify also confirmed that thanks to the rollout of its own conversational features, user engagement has increased - and this month expanded the UX of its DJ feature to include text conversations as well as voice.
Conversational interfaces are transforming the way users interact with products. And in this Deep Dive, we’ll take a look at the UX of over 20 different examples of conversational interfaces from companies like Google, Adobe, Pinterest, Figma Fitbit, Perplexity, Instacart and more.
If you’re interested in learning about how companies are weaving new conversational features into their products and you want to get access to examples of their UI that you can use for inspiration, then this DoP Deep dive should help.
Coming up:
Over 20 real-world examples of conversational UX from Google, Spotify, Adobe, Pinterest, Instacart and more - with downloadable UI examples you can use for inspiration
The exact UX patterns and elements the best product teams are using - from suggested prompts to agentic actions - broken down and analyzed in detail
How one company’s conversational feature drove engagement up 70%
Why some conversational features are driving user complaints and engagement backlash (plus the one critical lesson every product team needs to learn before shipping)
The conversational features and UX examples in full
How this analysis is structured
This new analysis includes a series of over 20 different examples of new conversational features from companies including Instacart, Adobe, Google Maps and others:
Product - the deep dive includes over 20 different products from a variety of different categories spanning B2C and B2B. This includes products from companies like Spotify, Miro, Fitbit, Google and others.
Conversational feature - most companies give their conversational features distinct identities or names. Google calls its conversational Photos feature “Ask Photos”, Instacart’s assistant is “Cart Assistant”. The name of each example is included.
UX elements - a breakdown of each of the key UX elements - more on that below.
UI examples - each conversational feature comes with downloadable UI examples that you can use as inspiration for your own product.
Link to more info - links to blog posts, release notes, videos and other resources to learn more about the feature and how it works.
UX elements explained
The design of each conversational feature is analyzed and broken down to include some of the following UX elements so that you can easily filter between each example:
Suggested prompts - conversational features often come with a set of suggested prompts to help the user overcome “blank-page” anxiety and help shape a user’s mental model of what these conversational features can do.
Voice - the ability to interact with the feature using voice commands. An increasing number of companies are rolling out this capability.
Text - the default option for most conversational features, allows users to interact with the feature by typing. Some products ship features with either voice or text and others include both.
Global button - designed to allow the user to quickly and easily access conversational features from anywhere inside the product.
Contextual help - in-app help designed to help the user understand how the feature works.
Search integration - in some instances, companies have combined their search capabilities with conversational interfaces to merge the two together. We’ll take a look at some of these examples and what this could mean for the future of in-product search capabilities.
Toggle switch - the ability to switch the conversational interface on and off.
AI Model Selection - rather than relying on a single AI model to power a feature, some companies now allow users to select which model to use.
Agentic actions - conversational features that blend text / voice chat with the ability to perform multi-step agentic actions on behalf of a user. We’ll explore examples of these actions together.
A closer look at the UX of each conversational features in more detail
Now let’s take a closer look at some of the conversational UX examples in more detail. And we’ll start with a new conversational feature that was announced last week that integrates conversational features using ambient design principles which makes conversing feel fluid and natural.