Top 4 Principles Used by a UX Expert Designing Effective Conversational UI
The future is already here. To build near-perfect chatbots for great consumer experience is gradually becoming a business growth hack that most companies are using. Nowadays, conversational interfaces are a part of the corporate strategy because they are making a real impact on business.
As per the Gartner report, by 2020, 30% of web interactions would be without a screen or voice-first. It shows that conversational UI has today become more refined than its earlier days despite its few limitations.
Today, there are mainly two types of conversational UIs.
- Chatbots
- Virtual Assistant
The focus UXers has to give while designing a conversation UI is content. In conversational UI, content becomes the style. So, an UXer needs to follow the below principles to create a better conversational UI.
- Clearly Define You Purpose
This is the first and most important step in designing a great CUI. Make sure you have a good grasp of the primary task that you want your chatbot to accomplish. Define your business objective, who are your users, and what goals your users might have for their interaction with a chatbot? Do not try to develop a system that attempts to everything because such systems may end up confusing users and not doing anything very well. Design it from the user’s perspective.
2. The Conversation Flow is Important
A good CUI can do wonders for your business. A chatbot is an excellent consumer service tool that can improve sales, provide unique customer experience, and automate some of the most monotonous tasks. However, for that, you have to understand how conversations between them and your clients work.
Design is not much important in a CUI, but you have to focus on conversational flow. The chatbot should able to predict user needs and provide the correct solutions. You have to develop a set of questions relevant to consumer needs, and the bot must be able to answer it correctly. Do not confuse or frustrate the user with too many clicks. Make it limited to 3 or less.
3. Be Concise
Generally, while using a chatbot, most people get frustrated and confused because of long blocks of text. So, avoid including them. As an alternative, you should focus on addressing one issue at a time as briefly as possible. Design your conversational script by keeping in mind the limited screen size of a smartphone.
4. Make it Human
Add a human touch to your bot through friendly language and maintaining continuity in the conversation. Your conversation will sound more human if you use non-lexical sounds like hmmm, oh, and so on. Provide easy access to a human agent if chatbot stumped by complex user requests or a user gets tired of dealing with a robot.
Wrapping Up
Designing a conversational UI can take the user experience to the next level. Of course, user experience designers are facing some limitations that are associated with natural language processing. There is still a lot of scope for development in this chatbot technology, and future advancement will undoubtedly take it to newer heights. Until then, if you are an UXer, you can use this guide and develop near-perfect bots for greater customer experience. Always remember, CUI is all about the conversation flow.
