Designing an Emotional Architecture.

When conversations are layered in shades of grey, how do we create effective conversational experiences?

Photo by Luca Bravo.

Real life is messy, it causes the way we engage with experiences to change from moment to moment. To evolve things like voice, chat and AI from a siloed world of experimentation to a widely adopted convention that delivers measurable value to users and businesses, conversational experiences have to do more than playback canned responses. They have to enhance our ability to think, perceive and make decisions. To do that, the interfaces — visible and not — will need the ability to understand and respond to the full spectrum of emotions.

Conversational experiences are enabling a more natural way to engage with digital services than point-and-click or swipe-and-tap. Although in the nascent stages, they will drive user’s expectation for a personal and authentic engagement with your brand beyond the mechanical, data-rich but dry self-service interfaces seen today. To make these conversational engagements feel more human — feel more like a collaborator helping us — they need to be augmented with a scaffolding of Emotional Architecture.

Today, most experiments with AI are driven by how well an algorithm works or how accurate anticipated recommendations are based only on a sophisticated data profile built from a history of clicks, likes and views. If the data profiles are binary then it’s not surprising that the AI and bot interpreting it looks, feels and sounds binary. It’s this binary = binary equation that leads AI and bots to be unsuccessful, not because they are programed poorly, or that they interpret data the wrong way. It’s because they don’t have the emotional intelligence needed to grasp nuance.

Emotional Architecture layers in the needed nuance that transforms a cold text message into a personal engagement. Emotional Architecture does not replace humans or try to be a human. The best conversational experiences understand when to intelligently help automatically and when to hand off to a real person. At it’s best, it augments the digital experience and strives to make it more adaptable, relatable and natural.

Adaptable:

Connect the context, language and tone to create and deliver a response.

Empathy (understanding the experience of another) is critical to a more meaningful engagement and allows responses to follow the fluidity of the conversation.

First step is to gain a baseline. Understand the gaps and how we have to adapt.

Natural:

Create an approachable, shared language to drive consistency at all touchpoints.

Familiarity creates a perception of ease to complete a task regardless of the reality.

Focus on closing the gap between the bot and user through better authenticity.

Relatable:

Establish a sense of trust that helps build a relationship.

Sympathy (a reciprocal relationship between two people) creates a mutual value exchange based on the story arc and learnings of multiple engagements.

Deliver personal conversations that anticipate needs and increase satisfaction.

To inject a layer of emotion into a conversational experience requires a relentless pursuit of simplicity. It’s a deliberate decision to focus on designing moments that digitize the human, face-to-face experience. When done right, simplicity hides the complexity of the business — jargon, processes, organization — from the user and doesn’t make the business needs the users problems.

In the end, designers need to focus on what they know best, emotion & empathy. How do we design solutions that help people make decisions? How do we design experiences that are more natural and intuitive to use when the only interface is text, voice or whatever future interaction it may be?