For many years, the question for web designers was always “what can we do to bring users to our site”. Now, the question has become “how do we take our (app/experience/thing customers will pay for) to our customers”. These are the integrations with chat bots, home speaker integrations, mobile notifications, etc. It is the idea that the user does not need to actually come into our system to perform some action; let’s let them stay where they are, in the tools they already use, and somehow invoke our system from there.
The power and drive here is that using your system now is very fluid. A customer may never need to know they are actually interacting with your service. All they know is that they were able to complete their task from within a context they are already in and familiar with.
The downside is obviously that you have lost some of the context of the user in your system. Complex interactions are harder to achieve. You can’t really give the user a form to fill out any more, that series of questions/answers is not very efficient in something like an Amazon Alexa interface, and must be severely restricted in a chatbot interface.
Originally Posted on my Blogger site June of 2017