In this second installment in our series on conversational usability, we dive into a relatively overlooked area of conversational interfaces that can have an outsized impact on the eventual user experience that results: information architecture. How information is organized, and how that scheme is presented to the user, make up a fundamental part of building usable and navigable websites. But what happens when we apply those same principles to conversational interfaces…

Intro: About Digital Experiences and Signs (Special thanks to Gerardo Gonzalez and Andy Hawks, engineers at CivicActions, who worked on this project -- and this post -- with me.) “Digital Experiences” are the next big thing someone at your company is almost certainly talking about. These include visionary technology that operates based on rich data that is timely and location-based, interactions between other services and products, and perhaps most importantly:…

To kick off 2019 properly, the Experience Express is taking a break from Drupal and web development to consider an oft-forgotten component of new digital experiences in the conversational space. Though many organizations, some of Acquia's customers included, have leapt headlong into building conversational interfaces, sometimes it can be difficult in such a newfangled paradigm to consider all possible angles where things can go awry. Conversational interfaces, and…

As we witnessed in the previous installment of Experience Express, selecting a robust mechanism for authenticating incoming requests is a key component of any decoupled Drupal decision-making process. After all, you cannot always necessarily predict the input sanitization features in place on consumers like JavaScript applications and native mobile applications. In the previous installment, we covered OAuth 2.0 Bearer Token authentication. Though JSON Web Tokens (…