Winning conversations: how to design conversations that influence people
By: A Diggle
Tags: Chatbots, Chatbot Design, Conversational UI, NLP, UX

Conversational user experiences (UX) take a lot of work. There’s a reason many state “I’m like a child and just learning”, whilst endeavouring to deliver adult grade conversation within months or even weeks of birth. Even for a basic chat to work well requires balancing NLP with scripting, simplifying steps to complete tasks, capturing data in appropriate places and balancing the ‘creep’ factor of AI and big data. The field is rapidly evolving and the rules along with it, this article intends to give you some powerful guiding principles to get underway.

A lot can go wrong (there’s even a website just on chatbot fails!). Designers must take careful consideration of each conversation — and we want to pick the most beneficial place to start to build, test, and learn from.

But #1: which bit to build first?

How do you quickly get a view of all the possible conversations that any of your customers or employees might possibly need to have with your company?

Introducing — The Conversational Ecosystem!

Conversations are complicated. They ramble and weave, change context randomly and cover many different aspects and topics. Replicating this in a machine is not an easy task — one of the many reasons why AI has taken 70 years from the “Turing test” to reach this point.

Conversational Ecosystem diagrams give you a high-level view of #allthethings your customers and employees need to chat about with your organisation. We created the conversational ecosystem to quickly get to a holistic view of a businesses conversational opportunities and how they relate to each other.

Visualising conversation relationships enables you to make informed decisions on where you want to start designing your chatbot. They can also help you design the first conversation better, by understanding what it will need to link to or what other conversations people might need to have next. For example, let’s say a travel Chatbot has the topic of booking plane tickets. The topics within that topic would simply be the methods of booking a ticket. For example, getting a recommendation from the bot or searching the bot for a specific destination. Once you have this mapped out, it is far easier to see potential linkages and value adds.

But #2: conversation design shouldn’t be rocket science!

Ecosystem models are used in science to understand ecologies, so it’s not rocket science! Designers have been using them across multiple industries to understand systems and scenarios. Architecture is often represented in this way too. Just as you need to design a house so that people can move between the rooms in a practical way — you can use ecosystem diagrams to help you design your conversations and content in this way too.

But #3: why not just design the conversation steps straight away!?

Your Chatbot/Conversational UX is another window into your business — and people are going to ask it #allthethings. So without understanding how all the conversations fit together, you can’t set yourself up for success from the beginning. “Understand” is the first step in the ever-popular and practical process of design thinking.