Designing Usable Chatbots

Chatbots combine Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing to allow users to interact with your company much as they would with actual customer support personnel. This can be through texting or through speech (with the latter including Alexa, Siri, and more).

Chatbots represent some of the first true uses of these advanced technologies in the consumer space. In fact, they are surprisingly easy to design. That means that they will most likely soon be ubiquitous, and you may well be asked to put one together. At the same time, though they may be easy to design, they are not necessarily easy to design well.

Though chatbot design is still in its infancy, this presentation looks at several developing best practices, as well as offering a model, based around human conversation, that can guide you as you come to understand how chatbots work, what users will look for in them, and – ultimately – how to design effective and usable ones.

What You’ll Learn

• What a chatbot is
• Why they are becoming so popular
• How they work behind the scenes
• How to design effective ones

Topics Covered

• Definition of a chatbot
• Recent emergence of chatbots
• Overview of how chatbots work
• Chat bot best practices
  • Being conversational
  • Not trapping the user
  • Projecting a real personality
  • Focusing the dialogue
  • Dealing with interruptions
  • Replicating best practices from Interaction Design
  • Grice’s Maxims (a linguistic model that can help you design effective chat bots)
• Chatbot don’ts