How to Start Designing Your Bot Personality

If you align with the brand guidelines, customer needs, and the needs of the bot — you’ll create a great personality.

As humans, we communicate with our words, gestures, facial expressions, and more. Machines are not born with the same capabilities, so we have to design them. Conversation designers give bots personalities to match the expressiveness we expect from natural human-to-human interactions.

Creating a personality for your bot may seem daunting. But, bot personalities are vital to the conversation design process and lay the foundation for a successful experience. Creating a detailed bot personality early on will set your bot up for success. If you start outlining a document at the beginning of your design process, you’ll have clarity, scope, and consistency before you even start writing any dialogue. Developing bot personalities early on will also help you organize insights and share design decisions with stakeholders, ensuring you’re meeting user needs and business objectives.

To begin the process of designing your bot personality, we want to align with our brand guidelines, customer needs, and the needs of the bot — here’s how:

Brand Guidelines

A good place to start developing your bot’s personality is by aligning with the brand the bot will work for. Consider your brand as a whole and the chatbot as a touchpoint in a vast ecosystem. In this ecosystem, there are the brand’s mission and guidelines to lead you through the design process.

Here is an example of a dialogue that is off-brand: imagine calling a bank, and the teller answers the phone, “What’s up.” This unprofessional greeting might make you reconsider whether you trust them with your money or not.

Examples displaying how voice and tone attributes are essential, stating what the bot is but what it is not.

When I design a bot at Salesforce, I rely on our six central values. For this article, I will focus on 3 of those values that are found in our brand guidelines — honest, helpful, and inclusive:

• Our bots are honest and never overpromise what they can do. They also identify themselves as bots up-front, so a user never mistakes them for a human.
• Our bots are helpful. We use progressive disclosures to be transparent and ask detailed questions to make turn-taking natural between the machine and human.
• Our bots are inclusive. Salesforce is used worldwide, so we want our bots to make our customers feel comfortable and welcomed when interacting with our products.

Within your organization, these values will vary. It will be essential to rely on the brand guidelines to align your bot personality with your company and customer base.

Customer Needs

The origin of the bot is grounded in the needs of the user. They’re made to get things done, not chit-chat. Without the user, your bot lacks purpose. At Salesforce, I work with Marketing, Commerce, and Experience Clouds. Before starting any bot work, I always start with our meticulously researched user personas to ensure the bot is solving a problem.

We can think of these user personas in the context of dressing appropriately, or inappropriately, for an occasion. The way you dress can show that thought went into the experience users are having. So, for example, wearing a neon suit with lights is inappropriate for a funeral, just like an overly-enthusiastic bot personality that says things like “excellent” and “outstanding” could be mismatched if the bot is helping you book a medical appointment.

Why? Because of the mental state of the users. At a funeral, people feel sad and somber; thus a neon suit is a mismatch because it does not match their mental state. Similarly, an overly joyful bot in a medical setting is insensitive and off-putting. A well-crafted bot personality shows empathy for the user.

A well-crafted personality informs the dialog and prevents off-brand dialogs as well as dialog misaligned from user needs.

Here are some questions to consider when designing your bot personality to match the user persona and maintain an appropriate tone:

• Why are you building the bot in the first place?
• What problem will you solve for the user with this bot?
• How does it greet the user?
• How does it react when interrupted?
• Does it apologize seldomly or frequently?
• Does it use emojis?
• Will it have Easter eggs or answer non-task-related questions?
• Is this bot perpetuating stereotypes?

One non-negotiable element of designing a bot personality is trust. Trust will look different for each bot, so think about what your customers want to accomplish and the information that is necessary, and they feel safe sharing to get that task done.

Bot Needs

Conversational bots need to handle specific tasks so they can cooperate with their human counterparts. Like us humans, bots need a certain amount of knowledge to complete the task at hand. Think about the knowledge it requires for the task and then consider what it can and cannot do with that knowledge.

These three groups are critical when crafting the bot personality holistically, ensuring the bot is on brand, has purpose and abilities outlined.

These are all things you should lay out in a document to make it easier to see how the dialogue will unfold as you move forward with designing your bot personality:

• What information will it need to perform a task?
• What information will the bot already know?
• Consider what your bot will have to do to keep the conversation going?
• Will it need to persuade the customer to retrieve data it can pull from a more extensive database?
• Will your bot discourage chit-chat?
• How can you create a background story to personalize the bot?

Now that we’ve started to think through your bot personality, it’s time to consider the technology involved and how your bot will receive information. Set it up for success by thinking about how it will receive variables, entities, or other data and communicate with other systems. Considering all of these factors, we can now start designing a bot personality that creates a positive user experience. Not only a positive experience but one that builds trust, inspires confidence, and forms an ongoing relationship with your product or brand.

As designers, we must be intentional about how our bots show up. When a personality is designed well, a chat with a bot will feel natural and seamless. When executed poorly, users feel friction and frustration that may turn into disappointment. We want our bot experiences to foster engagement, promote our brand, and nurture customer loyalty.

Conversation Design

This article is part of a series called Crafting Conversations. Check back for more articles where you’ll learn how to design great conversations and get advice from our team of designers and linguists.

Check out some of the other articles in the series:

Why Do We Need to Design Conversations?

What’s the Difference Between Conversation UI and Conversation Design?

How to Design Trusted Multi-Channel Conversations

This series is a collaborative effort between a team of conversation subject matter experts. Thank you to Michal Angel, Austin Bedford, Greg Bennett, Rachel Blank, Marlinda Galapon, Denise Martinez, Jonathon Newby, Shalini Johar, Isabela Berbel, Brent Laing, Madeline Davis, and Margaret Seelie.

Learn more about Salesforce Design at www.salesforce.com/design.

Follow us on Twitter at @SalesforceUX.

Check out the Salesforce Lightning Design System.