How to become a conversation designer

Learn to blend code with words to give your chatbot a personality your users will love.

Last summer, Anastasia realized she was a conversation designer. By then, she had been creating conversation scripts for Flo Health Assistant for almost three years. She just never thought there was a name for it. What’s even more remarkable, she could already be considered quite a seasoned pro in this field.

Let’s see what exactly Anastasia and her colleagues are doing, which skills this profession requires, and what a conversation designer’s career path might look like.

What does a conversation designer do?

A conversation designer writes chatbot flows for a particular audience with a specific goal. The Flo Health Assistant is designed to help everyone with periods better understand their menstrual cycle and symptoms by providing proactive and personalized feedback. It also supports users emotionally and flags any issues that require further investigation by a medical professional. The challenge is to achieve this goal while satisfying the Flo user’s needs in a quick, efficient, and natural-sounding way. To do that, Flo’s conversation designers need to map out all possible directions a chat might take and elaborate on them carefully.

For example, Anastasia is writing a chatbot flow that supports a Flo user who is trying to conceive during their so-called “fertile window.” To create a conversation like this, she needs to understand what questions the user might have at this point and how Flo Health Assistant — powered by research, the user’s cycle data, and the medical team’s knowledge — can help. After that, she can draft a concept design scheme and start refining it to eventually get a detailed script with multiple branches, questions, conditions, and visual elements. The script then gets approved by all stakeholders, including legal, regulatory, and medical advisors; tested by the QA team; and finally, it can go live. At Flo, the conversation designer would be involved in all stages of the process, from the initial research to the post-release monitoring.

As you can see, here at Flo we’ve developed a comprehensive multi-stage approach to conversation design that requires a lot of discipline and world-class expertise in different areas. This is because we need to keep the bar high as we’re serving the needs of millions of users worldwide and are operating in a specific environment. The conversation designer’s job might look very different in other companies, but we’ll stick to what’s familiar to us at Flo.

Where should you start?

Let’s see what kinds of skills and qualities will come in handy.

• Writing skills: Ideally, you should have some UX writing experience, but I believe that any good writer can become a great conversation designer.
• Analytical skills: You need to be able to collect, analyze, and systemize information; create conditions based on Boolean logic; and feel at home with dashboards and metrics.
• Empathy: Last but not least, to create great conversations, you need to feel the pain of your audience to be able to relieve it within your chat.

It would be also nice to have some understanding of UX design, basic coding, psychology, and the domain your chatbot operates in.

What’s next?

Anastasia learned a lot of conversation design principles by trial and error, which can be a frustrating process. You can short-cut your way by studying the theory and other people’s experiences.

Check out online courses

You can’t get a degree in conversation design (yet), but you can learn about it online. New courses get launched every year. There’s the Conversation Design Institute (CDI), which has a massive library of online courses on conversation copywriting, design, and AI training, and also provides certification. Then, there’s the UX Content Collective with their course on chatbot writing and design. You can find many others, I’m sure.

Read blogs and books

There’s not so much written on conversation design (yet!), so it might be the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a perfectionist — you could potentially read them all.

What I would personally recommend:

• Designing Bots by Amir Shevat — a comprehensive guide on chatbots
• Conversational Design by Erika Hall — a book about deep principles that lie behind all conversational interfaces
• Google’s library on conversation design

Study companies’ best practices

Major chatbot developers set practices that will be later followed by smaller businesses. For example, Google created a guide on conversation design for Google Assistant, and Trailhead launched a crash course on conversation design for the Salesforce platform.

Join the community and attend events

The conversation design community is growing like a snowball, and so are the number of dedicated events. Many of these were held online in 2020 in 2021 due to the pandemic, and there is a chance that this tradition will continue, as it helped to attract people from all over the world.

Moreover, in 2022, there’s a chance to attend the first Chatbot Conference in the Metaverse.

I should also mention the Conversation Design Festival held annually by the CDI and European Chatbot and Conversational AI Summit.

You can also find and join professional communities on Facebook or other platforms.

To sum up

The recent boom of intelligent virtual assistants has introduced the need to build scripts for these chatbots to follow to mimic a human-like interaction. In response to this demand, a new profession has been born.

Now is a perfect time to start your career as a conversation designer. There is strong demand for skilled conversation designers — far more demand than supply. Check out our Careers page to learn more about Flo job opportunities for conversation designers.

And there’s already a lot of knowledge accumulated, which you can study and start putting to use right away. To become a conversation designer, you will need to combine decent writing and analytical skills with empathy and a set of principles and best practices that you can learn in a few months.