🕵️♂️ About
Maker alert! I built a messenger bot in 3 weeks for curating Pinterest inspiration.
Duration : 3 weeks
Tool used:
Why
👨🎨 Designing PinBot
Treating this as a fast track project, I spend most of my design thinking time to come up with a Development Matrix and the Chat Workflow.
Development matrix
Essentially is a way to prioritize aspects of the developmental process. It is a way to channelize where you’d put most developmental muscle considering the infrastructure of any chatbot. I wanted to focus on Search, Creating and Saving a board.
Chat workflow
After figuring out high priority+high effort sub-features, it was clear I had to focus on aspects of Search, Saving and Creating a board. What followed was a chat workflow exercise, laying down detailed conversational flow of the bot with user. Such is of paramount importance as the output of the workflow is literally most of the content needed for development like Invocations, Responses and Fallbacks.
👨💻 Making PinBot
Plumbing (tools connected in a certain way to give a certain output) was complicated for making bots. Following is high level diagram showing each tool and its purpose in the plumb.
“Thou shall not re-invent the wheel!”
Enter “/Rubotnik” boilerplate
I knew I wanted to make this bot on Facebook’s messenger platform. I also knew that I miracle of me writing all up code with interface calls, webhooks and bindings was not possible in this lifetime. Such led me to find a real gem aka /Rubotnik boilerplate . In simple words, its a template for a bot on messenger with connections to interface calls, associated webhooks and binding, all I had to do was to customize the template to my use with the content I wanted to present. So what happened?
I customized the on-boarding / introduction
Added custom interface
Customized the persistent menu
If what you saw 👆excites you, read these fantastic articles which will help you design a chatbot ground up:
On chatbot frameworks: https://chatbotsmagazine.com/design-framework-for-chatbots-aa27060c4ea3
Chabot guidelines: https://medium.muz.li/the-ultimate-guide-to-chatbots-why-theyre-disrupting-ux-and-best-practices-for-building-345e2150b682
Testing a bot: https://chatbotsmagazine.com/usability-heuristics-for-bots-7075132d2c92
One-stop-shop: https://chatbotsmagazine.com/
This might not look like a deep documentation for the bot as I wanted this to be a showcase. This project has given me a lens into the process of development as well as profound respect to attributes of patience and troubleshooting. Let me know if you are interested, I’ll do my best to provide a comprehensive account ✌️
