Best practices for Watson Assistant journeys
Guide your customers through complex tasks, help them adopt new features, and let them take full advantage of your website’s capabilities
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Create journeys to guide your customers to adopt new features or complete tasks, leveraging your existing website capabilities. Hand-hold your customers with interactive help and support through video, text, and imagery — allowing you to provide assistance with more complex tasks quickly and without long-term development effort.
Best practices covered here:
- Choosing the right journey
- Writing the journey
- Using rich media in journey
- Testing and other considerations
- Getting started
1. Choosing the right journey
Consider these sample use cases
In case you need inspiration, here are some use cases to help you brainstorm areas that would benefit from having a journey.
Product onboarding
Use a journey to onboard new users and quickly explain important features and key areas of your website or product.
Completing a task
Guide users step-by-step by explaining each action in a task, or show relevant media to assist them in-context. A journey can provide help that prevents the user from having to go back and forth between documentation found elsewhere.
Walkthrough of a new feature
Call attention to and introduce new features. Users can directly start the journey from any point in your website.
Upsells and cross-sells
Promote upsell or cross-sell opportunities in your product to target users at specific marketing opportunities.
Consider your audience
Think about your customer base. Can you group these customers into multiple types of users? For each of these groups, summarize who they are, as well as their motives, behaviors, and needs into individual archetypes. Put yourself in the shoes of these personas and walk through your existing customer experience as that person. What pain points might they run into?
Example:
Lendyr, a banking company, has identified two main groups of users: new users, and returning users. Within the group of new users, there are two main personas: a person who is new to Lendyr but has existing banking accounts elsewhere, and a person whose first bank is Lendyr.
The person who has never had a banking account before has vastly different needs than a long-time Lendyr customer, and would likely benefit from an onboarding journey, whereas existing users may find journeys for specific tasks or new features to be more beneficial.
Analyze existing data
Refer to the analytics or customer data you already have to help you understand and quantify your customers’ experience with your product. When analyzing your data, ask the following:
- Are there any obvious drop-off points in your customer experience? Can you determine the cause?
- Have your users given feedback about functionalities on your website that could be executed better?
- Are there any pages that users are spending too much, or not enough, time on?
- Are there any pages that are confusing or difficult to access?
- What issues do users escalate most frequently?
- What issues do your customer service agents (over the phone, email, or otherwise) spend the most time solving?
- Are there areas of your product that are being underused? Can you determine the cause?
- Are there any other unexpected insights from your data that can be improved by using a journey?
With all the insights you’ve gathered, prioritize which ones will have the greatest benefit for your users. Consider these questions:
- Does it point to a reoccurring issue?
- Is it experienced by multiple personas, or is the target persona a significant portion of your user base?
- Are there any that will clearly benefit from a journey? Are there any that would be better solved by a different solution?
- How are you expecting your metrics or data will change after implementing this journey? What outcomes are you expecting to see?
Start with one or two journeys
Starting with just a few of your highest priority journeys will enable you to track usage and identify any drop-off points or pain points your users encounter. After some time, use the analytics data to iterate on the journey and help determine future journeys to create.
Be specific
Focus on accomplishing one goal per journey, and make sure all of your steps are relevant to the goal.
Do: Point out each step that’s required and describe the steps in more detail if necessary.
Example:
Step 1: “Fill out your account number. You can find this number in your profile.”
Step 2: “Fill out your contact information.”
Don’t: Have one journey that covers multiple tasks.
Example:
Steps 1–3: Connect a new account
Steps 4–7: Transfer money
Steps 8–10: Set up a recurring transfer
2. Writing the journey
Be concise
We recommend that the text in a journey step should take up one third or less of the visual space on the device screen. For most typefaces, this would mean a maximum of 4–5 lines of text per step.
When writing, ensure that every step is concise, contextual, and clearly worded. Avoid over-describing and over-explaining.
A single step should usually refer to only one thing. When determining whether a step should include one action or if multiple actions can be grouped together in the same step, consider whether the actions are simple, related, and located around the same place on the screen.
Example 1:
Step 1: “Select the accounts you want to transfer money to and from using the dropdown fields.”
Step 2: “Enter the amount of money you want to transfer. When you’re ready, click Submit.”
Example 2:
Step 1: “Click on Account, then click Transactions.”
Step 2: “Scroll down and click on Filter.”
Step 3: “Enter the dates you want to filter the transactions by, and then click Filter.”
Example 3:
Step 1: “The Library page shows you all of the documents and files you’ve uploaded. You can search through your files or sort them by title, upload date, and file size.”
Step 2: “Upload your file. Acceptable file types are PDF, CSV, and TXT.”
Keep the journey short
The longer your journey is, the higher the likelihood that you will experience customer drop-off. Try to keep your journey to less than 5 steps. If the tour needs to be longer, consider the goal of the experience you’re trying to provide, and whether it can be split up into more specific journeys.
Describe elements on the page
Once again, consider the user that you are talking to through the journey. Is it clear what certain icons or elements mean to the user persona you are targeting? Use descriptive language to assist the user as much as possible.
Do: “Click the red menu icon in the top left corner of the page.”
Don’t: “Click the menu icon.”
3. Using rich media in journey
Choosing the right images
Images in a journey should be supplemental to the content in the journey, but nonessential to your user’s success in completing the journey.
Do:
- Use images of buttons or areas on the website to click to direct users to the right place
- Use branding images to help tie in the journey with your website
- Use decorative images to celebrate task completion, introduce new features, and make the journey more aligned with your company’s personality
- Use images and text to describe the next step in the journey
Don’t:
- Use infographics, pictograms, or other data-dense images. Due to the size constraint of the component, images with a lot of text may not be legible
- Use just an image (without a text field below it) to communicate what the next step in the journey is. Using only images may not be accessible for some users
- Use an image that is unrelated to the journey
Best practices for imagery
Images in a journey are meant to take up one third of the visual space on the device screen. Test to see if the image you chose is visible and appears correctly and not distorted.
Due to the small size of the component, avoid using images that contain critical information to the tour. Instead, write the information in a text bubble instead.
When using both an image and text in a journey step, limit the text to 2–3 lines.
Choosing the right videos
Integrating video content into your journey is a good way to explain topics more in depth. Use videos that:
- Introduce a new feature
- Answer common questions a user might have
- Explain next steps after the task is completed
Example:
You have a journey guiding users to dispute a transaction on their bank account. After the task is complete, you include a video explaining what the user can expect, how long the dispute will take, and what they need to do now.
Try to choose videos that are no more than a few minutes long, or play only a relevant clip of a longer video. If a video is more decorative than informational, it should be 60 seconds or less.
Best practices for videos
Videos will adjust in height to preserve the aspect ratio of the video.
When using both a video and text in a journey step, limit the text to 2–3 lines.
4. Testing and other considerations
Theming
Journeys currently inherit the chosen theme for your Watson Assistant web chat. During testing, check that the journey steps are visible and accessible against your website’s theme and page backgrounds.
If your website background is white, we recommend using the Gray 10, Gray 90, or Gray 100 themes to ensure enough contrast. In the GIF at the top of this guide, the sample website uses a white background and the journey (and the sample website’s web chat) have the Gray 10 theme.
If your website background is black or very dark, we recommend using the White or Gray 10 themes.
For websites with color or image backgrounds, try Gray 10 or Gray 90.
To change the theme for web chat and journey, visit our documentation on web chat configuration.
Testing on different devices
Test your journey on as many different devices as possible. We support mobile devices, tablets, and computers. The experience may look and feel differently on a small iPhone SE vs a large Android phone.
Also be sure to test using different browsers, checking that your media is rendering correctly in each browser and your journey is functioning as expected. You can find the list of browsers we support here.
Anticipate potential questions
As you test, write down common questions that your users may surface. Create new actions to answer these questions for your users. Your users are able to chat with the assistant as needed while they’re on a tour.
5. Get started today
We have created some JSON building blocks to get you up and running. This will provide you with the basic structure of a journey so you can easily add in content specific to your use case. It will include the card used within your assistant, and the journey itself, with all of its functionality. There will be noticeable areas within the JSON where you can customize your tour.
Preview a full journey at our demo site, and check our documentation to start creating a journey today!
