Conversation Design 101
Weekly Ship #4 | Designing The Conversations We Weren’t Having
We are prototyping a tool for teams to make the hiring process more human. We value transparency, so we share our progress here each week. If you like what you read, please subscribe, and if you like it, don’t forget to hit 👏 .
A brief history of instant messaging otherwise known as a chat
Raise your hand: who remembers the good old times where you would spend hours on the phone? Endless hours spent with friends constantly interrupted by younger siblings? Conversing has always been a thing for us humans. This unfortunately for some — got replaced by this 👇.
Well, not everyone has conversations with their dogs, but almost everyone succumbed to the unexpected rise of instant messaging. It happened slowly.. almost quietly. And now it’s all around us. It’s how we meet strangers. How we get our news . How we talk to customers. It’s even taken over how we work.
“We don’t speak anymore, but we’re talking more than ever.” The Internet
Enter the Chatbot
It’s no surprise then that companies would understand the potential of this behaviour and start automating certain conversations. Why have someone on the other side of the screen do the repetitive and dull task of answering the same query over and over when you can automate it? A bot doesn’t really care about the repetitive nature of his/her task. Chatbots were a great idea and sure enough they went viral. There are more than 100,000 bots on FB alone. All replacing simple conversations. From simple requests such as ordering a pizza to challenging unfairly issued parking tickets. From answering medical questions to empowering women on getting a raise.
True, today’s chatbots are nowhere near smart enough to converse in a meaningful way with people, at least not for now. This is only a matter of time of course. Chatbots are the first stepping stone in conversational interfaces. We shouldn’t underestimate what it means to be able to talk to machines the same way we text friends and we most certainly can’t argue that when these Chatbots get an AI upgrade the conversations will take place in a VUI (voice user interface) instead.
In a sea of chatbots, how can we take a serious step towards a conversational interface that delivers real commercial value to a business and a delightful customer experience to a candidate?
We were not going to make one boring bot.
But who’s Mr. Hire?
Chatbots are systems that command and respond to users, but right now, they don’t deeply reason. Mr. Hire is no exception: it’s a relatively simple conversational experience, but as we apply design thinking to improve him, we will be able to craft a more advanced, fun and trustworthy bot.
As Amanda pointed out here “Until robots realise consciousness and take over the world, human interaction is the gold standard. We’re humans. We need human interaction. And humans have personalities. If we want to use AI to connect with humans, we need to make them not only intelligent, but personable.” How do you make sure your product has personality? How do you ensure the personality reflects the values and character of the company? Simply put, how do you design conversational user interfaces? Those, dear reader, were the question we were asking ourselves.
I had been working on a workshop — For The Bots– precisely to answer these questions. It was time to use it to bring Mr. Hire to life. And who best to do this with than the people that were going to interact with him everyday? We summoned our team at For The People to a two hour working session that looked roughly like this:
2 teams of 3 people each.
- Pick a specific user journey
- Build a character
- Screenwriting & role playing
The formula was easy, the results were exceptional.
For The Bots — The workshop
1. Pick a specific user journey
In the interest of time (we only had two hours) we asked each team to pick a specific bot-human interaction amongst these three scenarios.
Human conversations are never linear and unless it’s a very awkward conversation (or dreadful small talk), they go in all sorts of tangents. When designing CUIs you can easily get distracted by these tangents and rabbit holes, but you shouldn’t forget that there is an objective to the conversation in the first place. Users aren’t trying to catch-up with Mr. Hire, what they want is an interview at For The People.
Once they selected a scenario they were asked to write user stories. This helped the team understand Mr. Hire’s utility, but it also helped us gauge how the team wanted Mr. Hire to interact with them and what interactions they were expecting.
2. Build a character
A survey done by SPACE10 — Do You Speak Human? — suggests that ‘people prefer AI to have human characteristics such as voices, personalities and emotional responses.’ This is not new news. It’s the same reason why we fall in love with fictional characters in books and movies. They feel familiar. They feel like us. Aside from the fact that this would fundamentally change our relationship with technology — it makes me question: if voice interface is the design of the future are writers, anthropologists, data scientists and developers the new designers?
Designing Mr. Hire meant imagining his story. This is an exercise that writers are familiar with. Dungeons and dragons masters know the importance of a character sheet. It’s the thing that provides the limits for your creativity. But this was very new territory for us.
3. Screenwriting and role playing
Now that we had understood what the user’s expectations were and we could imagine who Mr. Hire was, it was time to put users and bot in a same storyline. How would Mr. Hire interact with the user on that specific scenario? Writing this wouldn’t be any fun without having to act it out in front of the rest.
By acting it out we get a sense of what feels like a natural conversation. Hey, no one said this was going to be easy! The idea is to do this exercise over and over again until it feels just right. Mastering the art of conversing is no easy task. Unfortunately for us, we ran out of time. But we had enough material to work from to refine Mr. Hire for demo day which was only days away. Stay tuned for more!
Most products launch when once they’re completely polished and perfect. We’re committing to share our work on this bot as we go. We believe more feedback makes everything we do better. We’d love to hear yours. If you’d like to be notified when we launch our beta product, sign up here.
