Chatbot Design Patterns: Onboarding

A series blog posts regarding design patterns that you can use to make your chatbots better.

One of the key elements that can make your chatbot successful is to focus on the customer “Onboarding”. For those of us who are not familiar with the concept of onbording in design terms, it can be described as:

The actions that a user needs to perform to acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective.

In a chatbot world, it is very much possible that your chatbot can perform many different tasks for the user. For example, your chatbot might be able to provide live scores for basketball games as well as provide players stats, game schedules, ticket purchases etc. What you need to focus on is how to empower your user.

This is a critical part of user’s journey with your chatbot. Use this moment to get your user started with the core functionality of your chatbot. Ask yourself, “What is the one take-away that you would want the user to remember at this stage?”.

Remember, once the user has tasted the core-value of your chatbot, you can then introduce the remaining secondary benefits of your chatbot at a later time.

Here are some tips on how to design your onboarding:

1. Keep it short. Don’t take too long to communicate the core-value of your chatbot. The user came to your chatbot with a specific intent and you need to quickly let them know what can you do for them.
2. Focus on a single task at hand. Your chatbot might be able to give current weather forecast, 5-day forecast, weekend forcast and pollen forecast etc. But you need to focus on a single most valuable action during the onboarding.
3. Help them get started. Chatbot is a new experience for most of your users, so help them with baby steps on getting comfortable using your chatbot. Get them familiar with basic vocabulary that they will need to perform tasks.

If you are using different entry points for your chatbot (i.e. the user can invoke your chatbot via Facebook Ad or Post comment) then make sure your onboarding is relevant within that context.

This is the first step towards a long-term relationship with your customer. Pay extra attention to their needs and get them to the “Aha” moment as fast as possible.