What is a conversation(chatbot) designer — and why will this role grow in 2020?

Being the first modern digital virtual assistant to be ever installed on any phone, Apple’s Siri started a groundbreaking change as to how users interacted with their devices. Soon, other companies followed suit, giving rise to digital assistants like Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana.

What made them so appealing to users was how they tried to sound and feel humanly by their conversation style. Designing a conversation is a lot of work with the only goal to feel as natural as possible and getting more done with fewer taps and clicks.

It is also vital that the conversation never takes an unprecedented turn and things start going south. In case it begins to happen, there is a well-thought-out fallback plan leading things back on track before the user starts suspecting the mess. And that’s where the conversation designers come in.

Conversation design principles

What does a conversation designer actually do?

A conversation designer is the one, tasked with crafting an online personality that bridges the gap between machine and human with a conversation style that kind of sits in the middle.

Conversation designers are required to possess the knowledge of voice user interface design, interaction design, visual design, motion design and user experience writing, that collectively make up the conversation design.

“Conversation designer” is a bona fide new type of job for the AI age.

One of the most frequently overlooked aspects of conversation designing is failing to understand when the conversation has side-tracked and being able to bring it back on the right path. An easy way…