Conversational UI: Five Danger Zones
Common pitfalls in chatbot design, and how to avoid them
Whether you’re building a chatbot or extending a voice assistant, we’re still in early times for conversational UI. As I’ve prototyped my own bots, built skills, and consulted on others, the guidance I give to other designers has coalesced into a few key areas where particular caution is warranted. Let’s explore five common areas of difficulty found while designing for conversational UI, and a few considerations for emerging from these danger zones unscathed.
1: Proactivity
As with many before you, you may be tempted to lean into proactive prompting: dialogue delivered to a customer out of turn. Traditional conversational UI is delivered in immediate response to a customer request, but proactive dialog might start a conversation instead of responding.
But before leaping into the proactive void, consider the context. Are you building a bot that lives within another app, like Slack, Teams, Skype, or Messenger? If so, keep in mind your customers probably CANNOT disable notifications for those apps — they need those notifications for the app to provide value. Consequently, if you don’t respect your customer’s boundaries, they’ll have no choice but to cut your bot.
