“Dot Dot Bot” received Honorable Mention of Innovation by Design Award 2019

We’re honored to announce that Fast Company has recognized SAP’s Dot Dot Bot in the learning category for the 2019 Innovation by Design Awards. Dot Dot Bot is a chatbot design methodology that helps teams create chatbots that answer the questions their customers actually have. Congrats to the entire SAP AppHaus Team! It’s so exciting to be recognized for creating an analog tool to drive innovation in the emerging tech space.

So what is Dot Dot Bot all about?

Have you ever asked a chatbot a question, and had it answer “I’m sorry, I don’t understand your question.” So have we.

In the SAP AppHaus team, we focus our work on human-centered design. When we worked on the design of chatbots, we realized they were often developed from a data-first, rather than a user-first perspective. This means somebody took a look at the data they’re working with, thought, “let’s automate!” and developed a chatbot to communicate that data to users. Nobody was thinking about what the users actually needed. Dot Dot Bot aims to turn that pattern on its head.

Dot Dot Bot is a methodology that feels like a game, looks like a beautifully designed workshop, and drives to a tangible outcome every time it’s used. It’s for teams who are looking to build a bot but don’t know how to get started. There’s no jargon and it requires no technical knowledge to complete.

It’s a fun, fast collaborative tool that anyone can use. All you have to do is download it and print it off our website. You can put it up on the walls in any room and all the other materials you probably have lying around.

In short, Dot Dot Bot helps you make sure that by the time your bot goes into development, the developers know exactly what to do: answer the questions their customers actually have.

A deep dive into the key activities of Dot Dot Bot

Dot Dot Bot is completed in three phases. Within each zone, a series of questions and activities enables productive conversation and creative thinking.

Zone 1: Scope

Define and align on what you are building, for whom, and why.

The first zone, Scope, uses business principles to ensure all participants are aligned on their group’s objective. Silent brainstorming followed by share-outs enables teammates to think deeply and find opportunities for consensus.

Zone 2: User

Understand the users and their context for using the bot.

Following Scope, Zone 2 helps participants define their users. This is core to the design of any chatbot; understanding who you are designing for informs everything about the rest of the design. To encourage a user-first mindset in participants, we have introduced a game-like element called “Portrait of a User”. The group collaboratively draws several portraits of their users. The key element is that each participant only draws one piece of the portrait. The segmented worksheet design provides the mechanism for collaboration and surprise. At the end of the activity, there are as many portraits as participants, and each portrait is presented to the group with a coherent story. One portrait is chosen to be explored further and play counterpart to the bot in the prototype phase. The activity does not intend to substitute true user research; rather, it aims to help groups begin to think in a user-first mentality as well as begin to hone in on who their actual user will be.

Zone 3: Prototype

Establish the bot’s personality and start to create conversation flows that become the foundation for the bot.

Then in Zone 3, we begin to translate the user’s values and circumstance into a conversation. The first activity is brainstorming all the questions the user might ask a bot. The group begins to understand one of the fundamental issues in chatbot design: the wide range of necessary information, and the varying ways a user might ask for it. In typical chatbot development projects, the full scope of this variation is often not realized until field testing or launch, after several months of investment. These messages, as well as the bot’s personality, create the baseline for the final hands-on activity of Dot Dot Bot, Dancing Dialogue. We designed this activity to have a collaborative, non-technical means of capturing the various potential trajectories and elements of a bot’s conversation. Each participant begins a conversation on a worksheet, and the group passes the sheets around, adding elements to build up an entire conversation on each sheet. This final activity is the a-ha moment for most participants — they realize the reality of transforming their ideal objectives into a human language conversation.

There are some final alignment activities. The final element of Dot Dot Bot is a wrap-up decision tree to helps teams without chatbot experts to determine their next step. It maintains the balance of humor and content depth found throughout Dot Dot Bot.

What our users think of Dot Dot Bot

• “Dot Dot Bot helped us understand our user in a totally new way. And we work in customer service!” — Retail beauty start-up
• “I’ve developed bots before. This new approach was totally different and actually made it fun. We had people on our team who had never made a bot, and this also helped them understand the challenges in a way that I was never able to explain to them.” — Developer in the education space
• “Dot Dot Bot is work…but it was also fun!” — Marketing executive

We’re really proud of Dot Dot Bot and glad that FastCo named it one of the 483 most inspiring designs of 2019. We believe that it can fundamentally change the way bots are developed, meaning less frustration for everyone who interacts with them!

• If you aim to develop a user-centric chatbot, get in contact with us.
• See all winners of this year’s award.