The fall and rise of conversational content design.

These days, everyone wants to be conversational. E-commerce, medtech, fintech, all the techs. If you’re a corporate brand, it seems like you’ll do anything to not sound like it. Instead, a trend to “level with our customers” and “speak our users’ language” appears to dominate.
In the era of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and all their friends, it’s not surprising that conversational design has caught on in UX. It’s probably not a big deal either because now, more than ever, we’re used to computers talking like humans. Or at least we know that’s what they’re trying to do.
In this talk, we'll examine why one of UX writing's favourite frenemies is so devilishly difficult to execute well. Spoiler: Real conversations are spontaneous, situational and physical – basically everything computers are not. So when should interfaces chat, when should they shut up and how do we tell the difference?