Chatbot User Experience And All That And A Bag of Chips
Are you reading the headlines? Chatbots are all rage these days. But despite increase in popularity, the consumers are still not fully accustomed to the concept. Most of users think of a chatbot that will be able to understand almost everything and answer to a very wide range of questions. But actually, it takes more than that to meet the real expectations of the users like crisp and natural conversation, sense of continuity, interactive templates and much more. So, bot owners must treat the visitors with utmost care when it comes to refine chatbot UX.
Let’s grab a bag of chips! and be with us to learn about what brands and businesses need to look out so that chatbot conversation is fun, engaging and easy on hands both for newbie and veterans.
Have You Identified Goals Of Your Chatbot?
Before jumping on to the topic, make sure you have figured out the real problems that could be faced by chatbots. Think more from the perspective of a user and what would they want to do with the chatbot. The goals of your chatbot reflect the goals of your company.
Do you want your chatbot to focus more on providing information of products offering promotions? Are you building an FAQ answering chatbot? Do you want to make purchasing or booking options simpler for your user? Is your website or mobile app suffers from navigational design issues? Ask yourself these questions and then start designing your chatbot.
Offer Some Tips, Suggestions & Options For The User
Most of the users will start their conversation without knowing what to say. If the user is left without any options, it can make them confused. Your chatbot should provide suggestions and options to kick off the conversation as well as navigate the user all throughout the conversation.
This not only takes off pressure from the user, but also help keep driving the flow of conversation. Make your chatbot capable of leading the conversation by asking questions. All these tips and suggestions help the user understand the intentions of the bot and get the information he needs.
Personify Your Chatbot With The Help Of Avatars
People generally love to respond to faces and that is why we usually personify things to derive maximum attention. Chatbots with their own unique faces also affects the conversation and user engagement. So choose a avatar that could better represent your brand, this would eventually play a major role in shaping perception of the user.
It is not necessary to come up with the avatar always, but something that can add some personality to the chatbot.
Managing Conversation Flow With Dialogs
Guided Dialogues
You might have come across this conversation pattern in most of the chatbots. The primary objective is to guide the user in the process of getting the service he wants. The bot can simply start with few suggestions and let the user choose one. This is followed by series of questions in the attempt to narrow down the search further &/or acquire some user information while conversation continues. This one-on-one pattern continues until the bot has all the information to supply the user with the relevant information.
Guided conversations might seem pretty basic to the user who’s expecting more but it’s actually designed not to bother the user as much as possible and stick to the business objectives all the time. Most businesses find guided conversations very convenient to design with different scenarios good enough to engage the user and drive the conversation smartly.
The complexity is a bit increased when the bot allows user to enter free text as an input. In this case, the bot owner has to make provision to ensure that bot not only understands the input but also interprets it correctly. For instance bot ask a simple question to the user “What’s your good name?”. In the ideal world one expects a person’s name in return but what if user enters a number or very long text let’s say more than 200 characters. Some sort of validation is required under such circumstances to ensure correct input.
In short, from conversational UX perspective, the bot understands everything and knows how to handle answers, leaving less work for the bot owner to be done in terms of UX.
Neural Language Dialogues
Everybody knows Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. You may ask anything and expect some sort of reply which answer your query or in some cases it might prompt bot to ask few questions back to you in order to narrow down the scope of search.
Such conversational dialogues are trained with the help of shake method i.e mix some parts of natural language processing, a pinch of contextuality and of course large proportion of deep learning technique to drive the conversation and also to maintain the state of continuous learning.
It offers advantage to the user to initialise the conversation as per his or her need rather than guided by the bot in the conversation. Overall such user experience is quite reassuring that user has some sort of control over the conversation.
Use Simple Language While Designing Chatbot
Personality is an important part of a smart chatbot. It enables a user to engage in a fun talk with the chatbot. But for that, you need to ensure consistency of your chatbot throughout the conversation. And this comes from the concise language and simple vocabulary.
The moment a bot responds with out of character, it can add to the bad experience. So, when the bot developer writes responses, he should stick to the language that is easily understandable by the visitor. Moreover, make sure you feed multiple responses for a specific query and then randomize them. Giving the same response repeatedly will make chatbot sound robotic.
Finally, your words are everything for the user. They are the beginning and end of a user experience with you. So you would not be taking any risk of misinterpretations and confused phrasing.
Increase Wait Time Between Messages
When developing a chatbot, one of the most common mistakes developer do is popping up the next message without giving time to the user for reading. It can be severely distracting because all users are not fast at reading. If you load or move up the message quickly which the user is still reading, it can create a bad experience.
The waiting times also depend on the length and order of the messages. For the best experience, increase wait time with each message, so that the user finishes the old messages before the new one appears.
Errors Can Make Things From Best to Worse
To err is human, so one can easily comprehend that errors are inevitable when it comes to chatbot. After all, humans have created it. While everyone try his level best to minimize errors, you should anticipate they would occur. So, you should try to amend things right after that.
For instance, let’s assume that the bot gets an invalid query from the user and it does not know how to respond. When this situation occurs, make sure your bot gently remind the user of its purpose so he can better understand how to rephrase the query.
Moreover, for making better user experience, the chatbot should confirm the information placed by the user, especially at checkout time or similar important step of conversation. For example, your bot should say “Do you want to book test drive for November 10. Is that correct?” The adding up of a question at the end makes user experience better. And also, the fault of committing a mistake will eventually fall on the bot, not the user. This also takes off any pressure the user might have while he communicates with the bot, especially when it comes to booking or making payment.
Good Messaging Client
The primary aim of a good messaging client should be to look the communication aspect from a user’s eyes. The placement of the avatar, how it instantly comes to life on user’s prompt, the background colours of the widget, all these can turn a bland user experience into a more compelling one.
Apart from these, the title and description of the avatar should be catchy enough to grab user’s attention instantly. This good first impression can really sift the conversation through smooth channel of trust and improve the overall brand image.
Biggest Takeaway…
Creating a great chatbot experience is not a piece of cake. It comes by incorporating artful conversational skills, intuitive messaging client and giving perfect character to the chatbot. Designing the best chatbot conversational experience requires set of best practices. You may also need to figure out the ambiguities, interruptions and unexpected scenarios that may occur during a conversation.
Across verticals, businesses are discovering the potential of chatbots — to help automate and streamline activities, improve business productivity, and enhance employee performance and customer engagement. While the earliest versions of chatbots were simple response platforms, today’s AI-powered bots are much more powerful — and will only become more sophisticated and capable in the coming years. If you are serious about building a kickass chatbot, and think we can better assist you in creating a powerful conversational bot, say hello to makerobos …
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