Crafting an Engaging Sample Dialogue to Optimize Conversation Design

If you want Alexa to help you find a restaurant’s business hours or a list of fun places to visit in San Francisco, then you’ll need more than a one-word answer to get the information you need. To take your conversational design to the next level, you’ll need a sample dialogue. A sample dialogue is a model for the different dialogs and flow of conversation between your voice assistant and users. It’s a part of conversation design that is similar to a wireframe for voice interfaces, and it offers several benefits. Here’s why sample dialogues are important and how you can design one.

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Why a Sample Dialogue Matters

Simple questions usually only need simple answers. But when the questions become more complex or may have several possible answers, then conversation design is important. A sample dialog ultimately helps you create great conversations between your target audience and your voice assistant. A sample dialogue is important for helping you quickly get a sense of the experience users may have with your voice assistant. You also get to experience what the conversation feels or sounds like sans issues for grammar recognition, diagrams of conversational flow and other technical distractions.

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Creating a Sample Dialogue for Success

If you know that conversational design is the right fit for your voice assistant, then you’ll want to dive into creating a sample dialogue. But designing a sample dialogue requires following a few tried-and-true approaches to enhance the process. Here are some best practices for creating a sample dialogue for success:

• Think about the scenario. The scenario you choose helps direct the topic of the conversation and the dialog your voice assistant will have. So, it’s important to design the sample dialogue around the scenario. Consider creating scenarios that can help users, such as a scenario where the user wants to inquire about their account balance.
• Streamline the process. Streamline the process by focusing on one scenario and persona at a time. This makes it easier to design an effective sample dialogue quickly without making the conversation complicated.
• Focus on the conversation. Keep the conversation in mind by designing scripts that focus on the spoken conversation to support an intuitive conversational flow.
• Embrace Role-Playing. Partner up with a developer or someone on your team to test the sample dialogue. By having one person act as the user, you can test the conversational flow and the efficiency of the script to get a feel of the experience. You can also better identify issues with the script when you role-play.
• Get help from conversational designers. Conversational designers have experience creating sample dialogues. You can take advantage of their expertise to design a sample dialogue that considers the different aspects of conversational flow you may overlook.
• Design for errors. Include prompts for typical errors users may have. For example, you can include quick replies to delays in the flow of conversation, such as “I’m sorry. Say that again.” This keeps the flow of conversation natural.
• Use prototyping tools for testing. Test your sample dialogues with the help of a prototyping tool, such as Botsociety. For example, you can use Botsociety to create high-fidelity prototypes of your voice assistant so you can test the conversational flow based on your sample dialogue. You can also detect errors, adjust them and repeat the process to finetune your voice assistant before finalizing it.

Final Thoughts

Improving conversational design helps make questions that require an in-depth conversation more natural and effective for users. That’s why it’s important to include a sample dialogue in your conversational design process. By creating your own, you can enhance your conversational design and the user experience.

Want to design your own sample dialogue? You can start for free today at Botsociety.io!