Over the past few months I had the opportunity to design an experience for a proof of concept SMS chatbot. The basic premise was to allow a customer to text with a customer service chatbot.

When working on the early prototype, the system was fast, and while that’s typically a positive characteristic, it felt unnatural based on the length of text messages returning from the bot. It felt jarring for users who were expecting to be interacting with a human and left questions about with who/what they were interacting. During user testing, we received questions about how a person could…