UX Researchers: Spice up your work with a chatbot project

Janna Cameron
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read
Some fun confetti that has nothing to do with UX research or chatbots

Have you hit a UX research rut? You know, where your research is entirely focused on validating if designs “make sense”.

If you want to spice up your work, consider working a chatbot. Here’s why chatbot projects are awesome for researchers:

  1. Chatbot testing requires a true hypotheses. The big question when designing chatbots is rarely “is it intuitive?”. Chatbots invite deeper questions like — “what’s an appropriate tone?”, “is it trustworthy?” These are meaty and fun to tackle!
  2. You need qual + quant data to design a great chatbot. As a researcher, it’s easy to stick to one type of data: whether is be small-scale “deep” research or large quant research. For chatbot, you absolutely need both. Unless you’re making something simple, you’ll need a large corpus of data to pick your use cases and plan your dialog. You’re also need observational research to get the details right. Fun!
  3. Chatbots live and die by primary research. With chatbot design, you don’t get any free points for a good layout or a subtly pleasing animation. A good portion of the success of your chatbot will be dependent on your primary research. You’re the hero! Woot!
  4. Chatbots need to be released before they’re perfect. You can’t fully tune a chatbot without it being used in the wild a bit. This gives you an opportunity to think about longer-term monitoring plans.

On top of this, chatbots provide a great opportunity to think beyond web patterns and consider broad principles like memory limitations, and attention considerations. This gives you strong transferable skills for new and novel platforms.

Maybe a chatbot is the challenge you’ve been craving.

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