Ensuring a great user experience
Throughout the process, user research and testing are conducted to ensure the conversation between the chatbot and the user is natural, relevant, and meets the outlined user outcomes.
The chatbot purpose and scope are core to the success of the solution, so try to keep it simple. Focus on a use case that brings real user value and narrow the scope so that what you deliver meets or exceeds user expectations.
The following list outlines guidelines from the Nielsen Norman group to consider when you are designing the user experience of your chatbot:
- Be upfront about using a bot and not a human.
- Clearly tell people what tasks the bot can do. Make sure that you don’t create false expectations.
- Don’t be overly ambitious: create bots for simple tasks. Complexity is not handled well in the limited bot interface.
- Tolerate typographical errors and ambiguity.
- Allow people to interact with the bot both by free-text input and by selecting links.
- Allow sorting and filtering to let people narrow down through results.
- Save information from one task to the next.
- Program some flexibility into the bot: infer context and allow people to jump forward and backward in the linear flow.
- Be honest about not understanding. Offer an escape hatch in the form of a real human, a phone number, or a link to a different interaction channel.
For more information, see The User Experience of Chatbots https://www.nngroup.com/articles/chatbots/.
The following list outlines further references that you can use when you are designing your chatbot: