HOW TO MAKE MORE THAN JUST A CHATBOT

Team Plakband found out during sprint 2 that making a chatbot is more difficult than it appears at first glance. As it turns out, there are a great deal of aspects to take into account, ranging from what software to use to deciding on the scope of the chatbot, settling on its content and ensuring that our prototype reaches a satisfying level of quality.

Seeing that the process can become quite intricate, we looked for a product development framework that would guide us throughout coming sprints. Here is where The Elements of Value Pyramid came into play, a framework published by BAIN & COMPANY INC. which extends Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”. In short, their research claims that coming up with new concepts requires anticipating what the users might consider valuable and then finding ways of delivering this value.

To this end, 30 fundamental elements of value have been identified which address four kinds of needs: functional, emotional, life changing and social impact. The more elements provided, the greater the customers’ loyalty and the higher the company’s sustained revenue growth.

So why did we choose this framework and what does it even have to do with a chatbot? Well, at the end of the day, our team is developing a product and we needed to find a compass for ourselves. This is why we are currently following a bottom-up approach, in which we began creating the chatbot by focusing on the functional layer and ensuring that we tackle a few elements of value: simplifies, saves time, reduces effort, informs and organizes.

Still, within the scope of our project, our focus remains on creating inclusive experiences for fans through interactive technologies. Hence our bottom-up approach. Sprint 3 was all about consolidating that functional layer and climbing up to the emotional layer, an important step for us to be able to develop an innovative product.

Alongside our partners, we chose three elements of value of the emotional layer through the method of dot voting: reduces anxiety, which means it helps people worry less and feel more secure; nostalgia, which reminds people of something positive in the past and fun/entertainment. We then prototyped two features which can be implemented in the chatbot: a sentiment analysis tool and a family-friendly measures tool, since the segment we’re focusing on is families.

What’s next? Since we like a challenge, sprint four is going to be all about consolidating those two previous layers and climbing up the ladder again, all the way to the life changing layer. Stay tuned to find where our journey takes us and how we aim to change the life of our users!

Team Plakband

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