Prototyping personality
Weekly Ship #3 | Bringing a bot to life with backstory, improv, & movie trailers
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 👏 .
For over a year now, my colleague and friend Jo and I have been experimenting with better ways of automating some our hiring processes at For the People. We weren’t happy with our existing process, which you can read more about here. At first they were a few hacked together IFTT recipes, which I wrote about here (spoiler: we learned a lot, but we had a barrage of tools, spreadsheets, and hacked-together bots helping us out) but as we evolved those tasks to form a bot, we very quickly realised we were missing something. Personality. It should have been obvious, right? We’re people. Trying to automate processes for people. And the bot we were writing to help us out, while helpful — wasn’t particularly, well, personable. Yet.
As soon we came to this realisation, we became inspired to colour outside the lines and play a little, prototyping not only our bot’s features, but his personality, too (Yes, it’s a he. We’ve called him Mr. Hire. It’s a working title, but we think we like it).
Why Prototype Personality?
In the near future, the personality of products will become a competitive advantage. With the proliferation of technology & tools like Zapier, IFTT, & chatbot tools like Chatfuel, WIT, and so many others — products and services become easier and easier to imitate on functionality. Today’s environment is about functionality. Tomorrow’s is about personality. Just like we want to be around people who are interesting — we also want to use products that are interesting. The imperative is clear: successful conversational AIs will build personality into products from day dot.
Why?
A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from.
Prototypes are artefacts for learning
Prototypes are for learning. We want to learn whether people value our offering — will they part with something (email, $, etc) in order to use the product — but why wouldn’t we also test whether people click with the personality of the product?
Prototypes force test drives
Unlike spec documents or tone of voice documents, a personality prototype forced us to climb inside the thing we’re creating and test drive it — not write the user manual for someone else to drive it. With the rise of conversational interfaces, personality is just as important — if not more important — than the technical abilities of a bot.
Prototypes are not excuses for NAP
A prototypes isn’t an excuse for NAP (No Apparent Personality). Why? Humans are emotional, not logical. We needed a way to speak to both emotion and logic — function and form. And the sooner we could get that into our prototype — the sooner we could see how people would respond to the personality we were testing.
We needed to have prototype our bot’s personality. Here’s how we did it.
Weird & Wonderful Ways to Make a Robot…Well, More Human
Make a Movie Trailer
As we started describing the role that Mr. Hire would play, we drew form characters we knew. Part lonely robot [Wall-E, from Pixar’s Wall-E], part sassy secretary [Donna, from Suits], part robot with an superiority complex [Marvin, from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] (a For the People favourite), part boy-wonder quartermaster [Q, from Skyfall]…our bot would be a greatest hits of the best of them.
Act it Out
I once went to improv camp when I was 11 and hated it. But strangely enough, ‘acting out’ the part of our assistant bot didn’t feel strange. It was fun. It gave us permission to be a little silly. Note: masks makes it more fun.
Write a Backstory
Humans are storytelling animals. When we started talking about this bot’s job, we realised that he needed to connect to humans. So we didn’t start with tone of voice documents or principles. We wrote his backstory.
“Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.” Robert McKee
Adjust Intuitively
Once we had a character, a backstory, a motivation, and a tone of voice for our bot, decisions became easy. We knew the frame of reference our bot had for making decisions. How he would talk if he were annoyed. What kind of words he would use. Decisions became easy, because we had a character who was coming to life (as life-like as a bot could be).
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. And it’s our job to inject that personality into our products. How do you make sure your product has personality?
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.
