Building RoomBot: My introduction to conversational UX
The world is abuzz with renewed talk of “bots” since several significant companies such as Microsoft, Facebook and Kik have recently announced their interest and investment into this space. If you’re not familiar with the concept of bots, Kik describes them in their recent video as “super smart apps you can talk to…. like an awesome friend who never ignores your texts.”
For UX designers this brings with it an entirely new way for customers to interact with your product or service using an interface they’re already familiar with: chat. And now that messaging app usage has begun to outpace social media platforms, this is the time to begin learning more about it.
After reading WebdesignerDepot’s recent piece on Conversational UX, I was intrigued by the idea of creating such a simplistic and purposeful experience. In addition, I had just discovered Esther Crawford’s piece on building EstherBot and learned that the technology and information needed to develop this type of interaction is currently within the average person’s reach. So, as someone with an insatiable amount of curiosity, I knew I had to build one.
Deciding what to make
Instead of working on another “Hello World” experiment, I wanted to create something that could potentially be useful for others. However, with only moderate front-end skills, I realized that developing a complicated language AI could potentially take a lot of time to figure out. Ultimately, I believed that a simple Q&A experience would get my project up and running fairly quickly. Essentially, if I could predict what users might ask (any bot maker’s dream), I could more easily provide them with a helpful response.
After some initial research into bot-capabilities, I thought up the concept for RoomBot. For a bit of background, I’ll explain that while our new office design within One London Place has been incredible and super inspiring, one of the minor challenges we have experienced has been with the naming theme for our meeting rooms and collaboration spaces. While delightfully full of puns, our meeting room names provide virtually no clue as to their whereabouts and can be difficult to locate. What this meant is that several times per day I would overhear colleagues asking questions such as “Where is Johnny Cache?” or “Font and the Furious? Anyone heard of this room?”.
Thus, RoomBot was born
RoomBot is an SMS-based bot that asks for a meeting room name (or the name of a person whose office you are seeking) and provides back to you a witty response with directions to that location. The first version was developed in less than four hours with the help of a starter bot package and a couple of the incredible APIs that currently exist to expedite this type of work.
Stay with me, let’s just breathe… and then look for a small, two-person meeting room in the South-West corner of the third floor. (Directions to our PERL Jam room)
After initial user testing by friends and coworkers, I have continued to fine-tune the bot to include support for interactions such as complete questions and the ability to provide help with basic directions (North, South, etc.). The bot was released to our internal teams last week and so far has seen some moderate and consistent use.
This is only the beginning
The process of working through and thinking of conversational patterns has been extremely interesting and what I have learned through this small project is that we are truly on the brink of an entirely new generation of digital experiences. Conversational AI is becoming so good that users aren’t sure if they’re talking to a human when they call a customer support number and hotels are staffing their entire experience with robots. The possibilities are incredibly exciting and I can’t wait to see what the near-future will hold for our industry. What an amazing time to be a digital creative!
For further reading and exploration, here is a list of of the conversational bots that already exist in the Facebook Messenger store as well as what is upcoming. In addition, here is a link to Botlist which is an app store for bots across all platforms.
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