Compare & Understand: Designing Chatbot Applications With a UI Mindset — Part 2

Author(s): Sanjay Krishna Anbalagan

Originally published on Towards AI.

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In Part 1, we explored how designing chatbot applications can mirror the mental model of traditional UI-based frontend applications. As we saw, tasks in UI design, such as searching for a customer or updating user information, are directly translated into conversational interactions in a chatbot.

But what happens behind the scenes when you click a button or submit a form on a website? In any modern UI-based application, these actions trigger a series of backend API calls. These backend calls are what make the app truly dynamic — retrieving, updating, or processing data on the server and reflecting those changes in the UI.

Now, we’ll explore how front-end actions communicate with the backend and, more importantly, how this communication translates into the world of chatbots using function calling.

In a traditional web or mobile application, the front-end serves as the interface where users interact with the system. But behind each action — whether it’s filling out a form, clicking a button, or selecting a dropdown — there’s a powerful backend waiting to process these requests.

Let’s revisit our banking application example. When a user searches for a customer and applies a filter:

UI Task:… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI