Daily UX Challenge #4 — Chatbot Onboarding Flow
This is a part of #DailyUX design challenge series. I write about my thought process of approaching 20 different design prompts.
Design Prompt
When a user starts using a chatbot, a first onboarding flow introduces the capacities of the chatbot and is the entry point to any other flow.
My inspiration — Duolingo Bot
Dancing Argentine Tango socially is my kind of sport outside of work. Out of curiosity about the Argentine culture, I’ve been using Duolingo to learn Spanish on and off for over a year. Besides picking up words and phrases in short sessions on a daily basis, chatting with the Duolingo Bot is also part of my regular practice.
Even though I started memorizing Spanish words and phrases as a result of repeated practices in short sessions, I often find myself taking too long to respond to simple questions from my Spanish-speaking friends. Most of the time, though, a moment later I realized I actually understood those questions.
So I started chatting with the Duolingo Bot. The social interaction scenarios help me understand how to construct sentences within a given context using the words and phrases I memorized. The subtle “Help me reply” feature is also quite neat — underneath the text field where I type up my reply, so I know where to get hints when I get stuck.
Chatbot to practice Spanish with social Tango focus
Given that I always wonder what people would say in Spanish within all the social Tango scenarios, I decided to design a chatbot that could help my fellow tango dancers practice Spanish within the context of social interactions in Tango. For the scope of this design exercise, I only focused on the onboarding flow.
Onboarding Process
What is chatbot onboarding exactly? It’s the interaction you have when you and the chatbot “meet” for the very first time. It usually includes these elements:
1) The chatbot greets you in the form of a welcoming message;
2) The chatbot describes what kind of tasks it can accomplish and how you access them;
3) The good bots also show you a sense of its personality.
Here is how my chatbot onboarding looks like:
- What is my bot good at?
I started with a plain and straightforward welcome message and declared my bot’s purpose:
- How do people use my bot?
I then used quick replies to invite people to use the chatbot immediately (more quick reply “cards” appear when swiping right) and described what command it responds to.
What I learned
I’ve always wanted to create something that merges two different worlds of mine, UX design and Tango. I was quite excited when I finally came up this idea that fits the purpose. I honestly don’t know how useful the chatbot would be (hint for user survey and research!), but I seriously consider devoting some time to make tweaks and complete the design after I finish the Daily UX challenge.
Last but not least, special thanks to my boyfriend who listened to my rambling about chatbots that eventually enticed this idea. Talking out loud with someone is a good practice for me to bounce off ideas.
Previous pieces in the series (so far)
Challenge #1 — Wallet
Challenge #2 — Landing page
Challenge #3 — Parking machine
