Best Design Practices for Chatbots

Chatbots have been around since the 1960s, but it was only in early 2016 that they gained wider attention. Since then, thousands of chatbots have been created.

Unfortunately, the quality of most existing chatbots is extremely haphazard.

As such, I thought I’d share a few thoughts from my position of having designed several extremely successful chatbots.

It’s All In a Name

First, it’s important to discuss the very name of the entity itself — chatbot. As far as I can tell, it was Mark Zuckerberg himself who solidified the word “chatbot” as the industry standard term for this particular type of interface.

Today, a “chatbot” can be primarily text-based, but increasingly, there are also voice-based chatbots. In the future, it’s likely that some kind of video avatar will also be used for chatbots. Regardless of format, a chatbot is, essentially, an attempt to provide a human-like interface for a real-time interaction with a user.

In my opinion, I think the term “chatbot” should be exclusively reserved as an insider term for designers and programmers. Most chatbots fail to fit the bill of a “robot” (for which “bot” is short), and they also may not be very good at “chatting” (interactive, freeform conversation).

I prefer to use the term “digital assistant” or “online assistant” when speaking to clients because these terms more accurately reflect what a chatbot does, but I will use the term…