Brands will die if they continue to focus on list browsing and don't embrace conversational interactions

People don't want what they wanted 15 years ago: lists.

People don't like to search, they like to find.
15 years ago, they wanted to find pages. Google solved it. The web was a bunch of walled garden portals. It was hard to just reach a website.
10 years ago, they wanted to find lists of things they are interested in to browse them: flights, clothes, hotel rooms, articles, anything. Tripadvisor, Expedia, Amazon, eBay etc. emerged.
Now people (for now early adopters an in the coming years, everybody) want to find answers to their questions. They don't care lists. They don't want to browse.
Uber (and other taxi apps) got it. You don't care what car, what guy, you want to know how much to go from A to B with a good quality.
Amazon Now got it. You don't want an infinite choice of goods, just a limited set of references, delivered quickly.
TimeToSignOff (a newsletter in France) got it: a limited set of information, high quality, picked with caution.
Tinder got it. You swipe based on pictures and limited bio.
Apple got it: even if they add new references, they don't have many products to propose.

Moving from generating lists to generating answers

I'm currently searching a place to travel to in January. All websites work the same way: just like Google search. You have a different flavor search engines, result display. At the end, it's a search bar + results mixing organic results and sponsored ones.
This is ridiculous. I spent hours searching and I'm still not sure.
What I want is stating what is my budget, my dates, countries I'd like to go and have 1 answer, the best... or a little bit more, let's say 2 or 3 maybe, to integrate an alternative as humans like alternatives and 1 sponsored answer to continue the weird way most website work today.

I often prepare my weekend searching stuff to do.
And the feeling is similar.
I search jazz concert in Paris tomorrow night. Dozens of results. I don't care. I want 1 recommendation, the best.

Train tickets: similar.
Cloths: similar.
Telco: OMG, similar.
Netflix: similar.
Supermarkets: similar.


And I see websites (Darty, FNAC) that were before pretty limited in terms of choices, opening marketplaces. They transformed their limited inventory into an unlimited list of often not that well-described references that have, sometimes, extravagant prices.

Link with human conversation, UI and chatbots

Let's check real conversations:
If you enter a bakery and ask, what do you recommend me, they'll pick 2 or 3 alternatives.
If you ask a friend what countries he'd recommend you to visit in Africa, he'll pick 1 or 2.
If you ask a person what is the direction to go to the Louvre, they'll show you one, event if there are various ways to go there.
If you go to a travel agency (not sure it still exists) and tell them you want to travel for 500 euros, they'll pick 2 alternatives.
Why that?
Because people don't like complexity...
Because a big screen or a tablet allow proposing tons of things, there is enough space.
An oral conversation (just like a chatbot) is not the right "UI" to propose tons of stuff. You MUST pick.

All websites focused on list browsing should consider this.

All website focused on list browsing are now investigating "bot" technology.
This is cool.
But here it's not just a question of technology or training an AI.
It's a question of moving from the list browsing paradigm adapted to 2000s consumers to the conversation paradigm, which is what people will seek the next 10 years.

Good luck brands.