Bots + UX: How do bots affect the way we design experiences?
What’s all the buzz about bots?
Chat bots have a conversational user interface, which means we communicate with bots using natural language on a messaging platform as if we were texting a friend. They can ideally handle tasks, such as booking a flight reservation, by simply messaging them.
Why are people attracted to chat bots? Messenger platforms are something that come natural to us. Many of us text (SMS) on a daily basis along with communicating on Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and many other widely popular apps.
Although it’s debatable whether users actually need bots, there is no argument in the increasing amount of bots in the market. There’s Microsoft Watson, Facebook Messenger M, Amazon’s Alexa, and the list goes on. I find it interesting because bots are not necessarily driven by user needs, it is more about businesses predicting that users will need chat bots to make our lives better and more efficient (or at least that’s my take on it based on the current situation).
After doing 10+ hours of research on chat bots, the development of bot personality and its interaction with users, I have learned a variety of interesting topics. I’ve narrowed it down to a few: designing a personality, trust, tolerance, and the overall relationship between the bot and user.
Designing A Personality: When designing a personality, research shows that imperfection seems to play a big part in increasing likability. For instance, if we take a look at Hollywood movies, most AI and robot characters are portrayed with one or more traits which highlights their imperfections; which in turn increases their likability. This could be due to the fact that it creates a human-like quality to their character. In addition to personality, AI bots can be depicted as dangerous. For example, bot characters portrayed in films like “Her” and “Ex Machina”.
Voice and Accents: Voice activated bots can benefit from having an accent in order to balance out a user’s tolerance for errors and offset technical challenges. In human interactions, psychology studies claim that minority of communication is through words. More specifically, 7% is communicated from words, 38% vocal elements, and 55% from nonverbal elements. What does this mean? Most of our interactions with humans are communicated through nonverbal actions such as gestures, posture, and body language. Bots take this element away; however, the contextual purpose of bots and their communication (at this point) is different from human-to-human interactions.
Trust For Bots: There must be a certain level of trust from users in order to maximize the use of bots. Why is this the case? Because users will be more likely to share and seek information from bots while trusting the credibility of its content. Additionally, users will be more engaged in the content and the bot can become the first line of contact for information.
Trust is deep rooted from a variety of personal traits when it comes to trusting another human being; such as having similar attributes, risk tolerance, relative power, and capability. Does this apply to chat bots as well? I ask this because users will know or be aware that the bots are not human, but will they expect the same sort of qualities or evaluate the bot with the same criteria as it would to another human being in order to trust?
On the other hand, humans are probably more likely to make errors. A bot can consolidate business data, historical statistics and productivity much more quickly than a human being. Once trust is established between the bot and user, it could be highly beneficial for enterprises to reach increased productivity and profitability.
Thank you, Bot: Users understand and know that the bot is not human, but some still feel the need to thank them for their services. What could this mean? We still seek human interactions or behaviors because it’s in a conversational context. Humans feel the need to react and interact with others (even if it’s a bot). This could be valuable information for how we shape and design conversations and user experience.
Tolerance: How much are users willing to tolerate errors and limitations? This is a highly subjective matter because some will be experts to bots, trying to ‘break the system’, while others are more tolerant to errors looking for a specific task and willing to forgive errors. Tolerance for each user is not easy to predict at the moment because it’s too early to have enough data. However, some research has shown that most users are satisfied with the tasks that the bots are meant to do with little to no intention of ‘breaking the bot’ such as asking unrelated or highly complex questions.
Bots may have different types of personalities or purpose, but users will nevertheless be expecting a level of intelligence and capability to accomplish tasks that it claims to be able to do. If we focus on the bots capability and making sure that it is able to properly serve the purpose that it claims to do, it will most likely be able to deliver positive user experience. This is a developing relationship that will be interesting to observe and learn from as chat bots become increasingly accessible to users’ in daily life.
There is no doubt that bots will be increasing in the near future. At this point, we can’t predict exactly how users will behave or react to them, but it will be interesting to observe and learn more about this interaction.
Bots + Humans = ?
Disclaimer: This my take on chat bots and how it may affect the way we design user experience based on research from various sources and insights from my background in Psychology and UX Design.
If you made it this far, thank you so much for taking the time to read this! I find this topic to be very interesting, and I’m excited to see what happens in this space.
References:
The Design of Personalities and Natural Language UX
