[CHATBOT] Introduction to Conversational Design!

ChatBot are the (old) new big thing for Human-computer interactions. Everyone talks about it, everyone does something about it and I guess you didn’t miss our last articles on this subject! (Read More: [ChatBot] The Next Big Thing? & [ChatBot] A New Competitive Advantage for Retailers)

But as ChatBot deeply change the way a user will interact with a service, it also changes the way us, developers, will design the piece of software that will be the interface between the human and the machine. With Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), we needed to design a user experience (UX, which is how the user will navigate within the software) and the graphical representation itself (how the information will be displayed). These 2 steps were mostly merged and let into the hands of the graphical designer, even if UX is giving a more and more important place. But in the case of ChatBot, it’s a bit different. 

Firstly, GUIs are most of the time handled by a third-party application (Wechat, Slack, Skype, etc…) so you don’t need to take care of it. Of course, if you decide to create your own conversation GUI, or when you send images to the user, you still need GUI design. Anyway, in this article we will talk only about the conversation aspect of the ChatBot.

Secondly, the user does not navigate from one page to another anymore: the information is pushed toward him. In this case, UX appears as being quite different as it now mostly represents how the conversation will flow. This is what we call conversational design or conversational UX.

New techniques implies new needs. If you can say goodbye to your preferred designer for the ChatBot part, you’ll need to handle a new task: designing the conversation. And for this, you’ll need new tools.

You will find numerous solutions to design your ChatBot. Here are 3 of them that we suggest to use. Our choices of softwares are subjective. We like them, we show it to you. You’ll find others on the internet if you’d like to try more.

Paper or blackboard

We developers lover our computers. But we’ll never forget the old paper and pen, always useful at some point of our work. When paper is used to sketch up a GUI by designers, it can be used for a complete conversation design.

One of the best advantages of this method is that you design your ideas as you wish. Indeed, there is currently no standard for designing conversations, so go on and try to find the best way to do it! Also, with this innovative method you can design linear dialogs as well as non linear ones (see in the end of the article to know the difference).

Walkie 

Walkie is a free online tool to design conversation. It’s designed kind like a Slack window in which you can create different ChatBot. For each ChatBot you can define several stories. One story will be one possible conversation between the bot and the user. 

Walkie is very convenient to design linear conversations and share it with developers, but also to give a visual representation of how the conversation with the bot will look like.

It’s also possible to design non-linear conversation by creating one story per possible path, but in this case your conversation net should not be too complex if you don’t want to create hundreds of stories!

At least, Walkie is very convenient for linear conversations and developer can easily integrate on scenario after the other based on stories in this tool. (Source: https://walkiebot.co/)

Twinery

Twine is not primarily made for designing conversations but instead for designing interactive stories (you can use it for example to write a game book). But hey! What are interactive stories if not conversation between the story and you? The book asks you want you want to do for your next action, you answer and the story moves forward in one direction or another depending on your answer. That’s exactly what we do with a ChatBot.

Actually, interactive stories are so close to the behaviour of a ChatBot that a lot of ChatBot are actually designed for this purpose of playing inside a story. This makes Twine a perfect tool for designing a ChatBot, mostly when you need to design a complex non-linear one.

Twine is open-source and has very nice UI. It’s very easy to handle it and its visual representation of the possible paths for a conversation will a lot the integration work for developers. (Source: https://twinery.org/)

Linear or non-linear conversation ?

A linear conversation is basically a question/answer model with no way to move from the main subject of the conversation. Questions can be asked either by the bot or the user

A non-linear conversation let the conversation to take different ways during its flow. It can also move backward if needed. A non-linear conversation will seem more natural if it’s well handled but it can become a lot more complex than a non-linear one.

A bot will generally be a mix of linear and non-linear dialogs. For example, if a user asks the bots to book a table in a specific restaurant, it will initiate a linear dialog to know the conditions of the booking (how many people and when). If the user asks for booking a restaurant not clearly knowing what kind he would like, the bot will initiate a non-linear dialog to try to find the best restaurant for the user before initiating the booking (with potentially a complex combination of questions depending on each answer).

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