How to get your conversation, to flow
The research is done, you’ve got your chatbot’s personality sorted, you’ve decided on the first conversation and it’s a short one, great. You’ve written down lots of different ways the user might ask the question and how you think they’ll want the reply. What now? Well now you’ve come to the conversation flow diagram. But where to start, what does it look like, how do I create something that a developer can work from?
Before you open your choice of software, have you role played the conversation in real life, with the person at the next desk, your partner, the dog? No, just being silly. But it’s important to role play the conversations in real life for 4 reasons.
1. It helps you get the structure of the conversation in your head, or recorded on your phone.
2. It keeps you from slipping into more formal language. Conversations do need to sound, well, conversational, so keep it friendly.
3. Role playing often brings up different ways the user might ask a question or what they might leave out. This is important later.
4. Having fun, role playing with your buddy can bring up some humour to give your bot some all-important personality.
Now you have lots to work with, but which software to use to make the diagram? There may be a programme sat on your computer just waiting, but if not, I can recommend 2, but I’m sure there’s plenty of others.
· Microsoft Visio, easy to use and very powerful, has lots of great features. You may already have it if your company has 365, if not, it’s not cheap. If you want to try it, you can get a trial version here.
· Draw.io isn’t as powerful but it’s really easy to use, free and you can link it to your google drive to save your diagrams.
Start your conversation structure with the shortest route to completion. Let’s imagine a scenario. You’re running a circus skills convention with lots of different talks and you’re making a chatbot to give people information about them. Let’s pick a straightforward question. “What time is the History of Juggling talk?”
Your software will probably have a set of shapes for process flow diagrams with a start/end shape, process and decision shapes. Okay, at least we can start. Imagine your user has already opened your chatbot, we can put in the intention of the request (intent) into a process square. We can also put in our happy ending, where the user gets the information they need, Fig 1.
This seems all straightforward and if the user gives all the information the bot needs to fulfil their intent we could just draw an arrow from square to square. But what if the user doesn’t give the name of the talk they want to go to? The Bot needs that to ‘fill the slot’ and give the user the right information. We need a decision point in our diagram showing what happens if the slot isn’t filled when the user first asks their question.
Fig. 2 shows the same user intent with the additional decision point and how the bot can fill that slot by asking the user what talk they want to go to. All this information came from your role playing earlier when you and your office buddy had fun recording each other.
There are, of course, more complex flows but you get the idea that it’s good to start simple and build from there, including all the what ifs. If you’ve put the planning in beforehand you’ve got all the information you need and you can whip up your diagram quick as a flash and pass it on confidently.
