Interaction Design: The Making of a Chatbot’s Personality
How UX conversation design choices were made to craft the persona of Alfred, IBM’s cognitive chatbot
The best design isn’t obvious. It’s transparent.
As Donald A. Norman, author of “The Design of Everyday Things,” once said, if a device as simple as a door requires instructions such as “push” and “pull,” then it has failed as a design.
The best kind of door explains itself in its appearance.
This holds true for the design of technology platforms as well.
Whether it’s the simplicity of Instagram or the spontaneity of Snapchat, individual preferences for a platform no longer depend on utility, but rather on how it makes them feel.
By enabling interactions that are seamless with everyday life, design bridges the gap between humans and technology. Through these optimized experiences, users are in turn able to develop a relationship with the platform.
It’s Don Norman’s ideal door: practically invisible, but always there to fit our needs.
But how does a designer open that door of seamless interactions for its users when the only tool available to him is simple text?
The answer is in personality.
When developers build chatbots, they care less about implementing the most advanced technological capabilities, and more about how the chatbot engages its users.
Yet, because chatbots feature a text-only interface, vocabulary, syntax, formatting, and line spacing all take on a new relevance in crafting its persona.
Whether it’s a one-worded response or lengthier formal sentences, the placement of each word, punctuation, and line break all come together to affect perception.
Language, as such, becomes personality, and UX design is now an act of communication.
The importance of crafting a chatbot’s personality is twofold.
First, it sets the tone for a user’s experience.
IBM’s chatbot Alfred, for example, uses friendly and personable language, as well as non-lexical sounds such as “oh” and “hmm,” to elicit human emotions from its users and generate a positive connection.
Empathy is the heart of great design, which in conversations, is conveyed through language.
Second, in a crowded marketplace of emerging technology, personality becomes the distinguishing feature amongst chatbots.
During World War II, British spies were able to identify specific German radio operators based on their “fists”: the individual style, cadence, speed, and frequency in which they communicated in Morse code.
For Alfred, his “fist” is more than just his black top hat, pink bow, and bright blue exterior. His timely response, casual tone, and young demeanor have become iconic in his style too.
Since style affects perception, and a chatbot is a window into a company’s brand, the personality of a chatbot can have enormous implications on an individual’s feelings for that brand.
Thus, the responsibility to design a chatbot’s conversational interface harbors enormous potential to add value and memorability to a brand.
After all, it’s not the conversations with chatbots that people will remember down the road.
It’s how the conversations made them feel.
