Designing Bot Conversations
Introducing BotMock — A new way to create interactive bot conversational mocks that can be exported into gif or video instantly.
Bots are everywhere — well almost. They will be everywhere soon. With the recent push from platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Skype and Microsoft, we will see a lot more of these bots in future. And that is a good thing.
Bots, when designed properly, can enchance your experience when chatting with businesses or individuals. The key is to design them properly. And that is a hard problem, along with NLP and ML.
So when we started to look into conversation design, we realized that the industry did not really have a good tool to achieve this. People were using multiple tools and techniques that were almost all scrapped together from whatever existing tools they had in designing interfaces.
We saw a combination of designers using Sketch (or Photoshop) to create conversation mocks for sales presentations or to get a feel for how the conversation flow would look like. Some of them were using tools like PullString to map the conversation but these conversations could not be easily tested or demoed within a bot context.
So last year we set out to build a solution for this problem. We identified a few key value props for our solution. Our solution should address the following challenges:
- Provide an easy way to create flows that can be tested
- Provide an easy way to collaborate on designing these flows
- Provide an easy way to quickly tweak and test these flows
- No upfront development effort to get a visual on a conversation
- Extract conversations as an animated Gif or Video
The result is something we are calling BotMock.
In our first release we address the issue for designers (and even non-designers) to quickly layout the bot conversation (currently for Facebook Messenger only). This is the first step in creating a tool that allows bot developers and designers to quickly visualize what their bot interactions would look like. They can invite team members to participate in designing these conversations and they can even export them into gif and videos to use in sales or marketing presentations.
But this is just a start. Our goal is to merge the worlds of interactions and mock into a single tool that will allow designers and developers to work in collaboration and create some amazing bots.
Our roadmap includes features like:
- Support for other platforms such as Slack, Telegram, Skype and more
- A more visual way to create bot conversation maps and ability to convert them into interactive mocks
- Build better collaboration tools deeply integrated with the solution
Check us out at http://www.botmock.com and do give us feedback on how we can improve it.
