Guide on UX Design of AI Chatbots

Talking about UX design for AI chatbots is complex, especially considering it's a User Experience designed to carry a human-like conversation or interaction. Conversational AI constantly evolves; therefore, establishing specific insights to create a good experience to guarantee user satisfaction for AI-based products is harsh. However, today, you'll learn the main advice you should follow to make a good UX design for your AI chatbot.

What is Conversational UX?

First, let's find out what this type of User Experience is. Conversational UX, or conversational interfaces, refers to designing and implementing chat, voice, or other technologies. It involves creating two-way communication between a user base and robots, allowing users to interact with technology through conversations in real-time. These are some key points about conversational UX:

1. Mimic Human Conversation. It aims to replicate the logic flow and style of a real person's conversation, making interactions with technology feel more familiar and comfortable.

2. Combination of Communication Channels. Conversational UX combines various forms of user communication, such as chat, voice, and other interfaces.

3. Improved User Experience They play a critical role in enhancing the user experience, allowing users to access information quickly, get product recommendations, make purchases, book appointments, and more.

Conversational UX is becoming increasingly important in various industries, including customer support, customer service, e-commerce, and virtual assistants. It allows businesses to provide their users with more personalized and efficient services while improving engagement and satisfaction.

User Experience Design for AI Chatbots

Creating a UX Design for an AI Chatbot interface integrates many elements and considerations; they're advanced technologies that allow communication with users using trained algorithms. A chatbot is a computer program that uses Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing to understand a user's questions and automate the answer, simulating a human conversation.

LinkedIn and Gmail actually use AI chatbots to help users through smart replies and prescribed interactions. However, they're not only present in these companies; they're becoming more popular as they can reduce the cost of customer support like Slackbot, Google Home, Siri, and Alexa. Today, we want to let you know what steps follow to create a flawless UX design for AI Chatbot, known as Conversational UX.

Steps to Create an AI Chatbot

1. Bot Personality

As a brand needs its identity, you must also create a chatbot personality for your AI-powered chatbot. Among the aspects to consider for Artificial Intelligence chatbots are detailing their appearance and voice tone. A good practice to achieve this is to draw a portrait for the bot, which will develop an idea of this "person" during the conversation.

Suppose you are designing an AI chatbot to educate children. In that case, the bot can look like a teacher with a soft voice tone, or maybe it may be a cartoon character with a playful voice tone with easy-to-understand language. Also, the character must wear colorful and fluffy clothes, considering that this personality might be one the target audience is most willing to talk to.

2. Activation Experience

Designing the activation experience is more complex for voice than for text chatbots. The users must know how to activate the software, so you must define an intuitive and easy-to-use trigger. For example, Google uses "Hey Google" and "OK Google" as triggers; however, if you use "Hello Google," the chatbot doesn't respond to you.

A real person knows when to pay attention, and mentioning the person's name every second is unnecessary; however, chatbots don't have that capacity. Therefore, you must determine the calls to action or AI-based chatbots through specific triggers.

3. Starting Point

You need to know what users will likely use the chatbot to design a user-friendly starting point. For example, if the user visits the bank's website, they may want to obtain information about loan interest rates, options, and limits. In that same order, the bank's chatbot can provide three starting options, including "I want to get a quote," "What are the available loan options?" and "How much can I borrow from the bank?"

4. User Context

User Context is the king of any digital product. You must understand the user journey and user intent in which they will use your AI chatbot to consider any scenarios that can occur at that moment. For this reason, it's necessary to analyze users' needs in different scenarios in-depth and determine the questions they can ask.

5. Script Design and Writing

When you create a script for an AI chatbot, you must draw a dialog flow according to the user's requirements, thinking about all the ways users can ask about the topic. For example: "How much traffic is there on the way home"?

So, you must consider everything related to the context in which the user will use your software; these types are called rule-based chatbots. If you're creating a map service chatbot, it's necessary to identify the place, time, and traffic. On the other hand, if you make a chatbot for an online newspaper, you must highlight key questions and answers to respond to the users' concerns, such as: "What is the most outstanding news today?

Final Thoughts

UX Design in AI is relative; each User Interface requires a different development and design process. However, all UX Designers share five principles in any User Experience: transparency, simplicity, accessibility, optimization, and inclusion. Be sure to include these items in your next project!