Chatbot User Experience 101: Vital Tips to Improve Chatbot UX
Read the headlines and you’ll find that chatbots are en vogue right now — everyone wants one! But despite being popular for brands and businesses, consumers are just now getting accustomed to the new conversational medium. Bot makers must treat users with care so they aren’t scared off.
An important part of the chatbot design process is to account for chatbot UX. While maintaining a bot’s functions is necessary, it means little if chatbot UX design is poor. Below are chatbot UX tips to ensure your bot is fun, inviting and easy to use for new and veteran users.
Onboarding is Vital to Chatbot User Experience
Onboarding is an essential component to conversational UI because:
- It makes the first impression for the user
- It helps the user understand how (and why) to use the chatbot
The most important thing you can do to improve chatbot UX in onboarding is set expectations for the user. Because chatbots aren’t yet at the level of expectation for users dreaming of sci-fi, futuristic AI, be up-front about what tasks your bot can and can’t perform.
A good onboarding process has the power to increase average session length and get essential information from the user immediately. It should also lead the user through the initial conversation, helping them to discover features while making a value proposition. When users quickly know what the bot does and how they can meet that goal, they’ll be more inclined to come back for future conversations.
Offer Suggestions, Tips and Options for Good Chatbot UX Design
Many users will begin a conversation with a chatbot without knowing what to say. When left to their own devices, they can feel confused. As said above, your onboarding process can get users off to a good start, but your bot should provide options and suggestions to steer the user all throughout the conversation. In addition to taking pressure off the user, response suggestions keep up momentum to ensure the conversation flows.
One way to provide suggestions is with menu buttons. Chat platforms like Kik and Facebook Messenger let you offer a series of responses that users can tap to use. Because users won’t have to type out a response, this option is favored for making on-the-go conversations as easy as possible. If you intend to provide such options, it’s important that you adequately anticipate the type of things people will want to say to your bot — but that should be part of your conversational design philosophy anyway.
In addition to providing options, your bot can lead the conversation by providing tips or asking questions. These suggestions help your user understand what the bot does; on the bot’s end, answers to questions provides it with the information it needs about the user. Be careful, though: don’t rely on open-ended questions. Instead, opt for multiple-choice ones to ensure the user and bot don’t get confused.
Use Simple Language & Diction in Your Chatbot Design Process
It can’t be overstated how important personality is for a chatbot; personality makes a bot fun to talk to. When you’ve developed a bot personality, ensure your bot’s voice remains consistent throughout the conversation. Moments where a bot speaks “out of character” can be immersion breaking for a user.
When writing the bot’s responses, it’s generally advised to stick to concise language and a simple vocabulary. Never use jargon that can confuse the user! Instead, stick to language that anyone can understand easily. This is among the most important of chatbot UX tips because ease and brevity are key for conversational UI. When testing your bot and its responses, try different devices to ensure the user doesn’t need to scroll to read a response. If it’s too long, they might just walk away.
Finally, be sure to provide multiple responses per query, then randomize them. Providing the same response over and over again makes your chatbot sound, well, robotic. It’s easy to imagine how boring repeat conversations can become in this situation, so improve chatbot UX by shuffling responses.
Errors Can Make or Break Chatbot User Experience
Unfortunately, errors are inevitable. While you can do your best to ensure there are as few as possible, anticipate they will occur — then work to make things right. For example, let’s say a user provides an invalid query that the bot doesn’t know how to respond to. When this happens, your bot should gently remind the user of its purpose (perhaps with an example query) so the user understands how to better phrase their query.
Next, your bot should confirm information provided by the user at important conversation steps. Let’s say your bot takes restaurant reservations. Upon fulfilling the task, it might say: “You want to reserve a table for October 5. Is that correct?” By phrasing with a question, the fault of a mistake falls on the bot and not the user, which in turn eases any pressure the user might feel when using the bot.
