What UX for your chatbot?
A chatbot is nothing more than a way to present content and automations in a different form: that of an interlocutor who speaks the same language as your users. If setting up a chatbot has never been so easy thanks to solutions like Vizir, one of the big questions to ask yourself when starting this project is “what UX for my chatbot?”
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Gaston Gougeon
- le 16 November 2022
The interest of a chatbot in the user experience
1 - Give your users a reference point in the form of a contact person
Whether your chatbot is available on the web, in your colors, or on a chat platform (Teams, Messenger, etc.), its role is above all that of an interlocutor for your users.
Its language and tone must reflect what it stands for and why it exists. It is a landmark for your users, who must understand from their first interactions what the chatbot is for, in order to limit their frustration and engage them to use it.
2 - Make content available quickly and easily
A chatbot can also have a role as a knowledge base mediator. It is a powerful tool that allows your users, behind the mask of a conversation, to search through a very large amount of resources .
When properly set up, it can then allow your experienced users to find the resource they are looking for very quickly; the less experienced to be guided in their search; and those who don’t know exactly what they are looking for to get a quick idea of what is in the knowledge base.
The chatbot limits the interface of the knowledge base, making it more understandable for your users.
3 - Propose automation shortcuts
Another use case for a chatbot is process automation. Whether it’s filling out a ticket when an issue couldn’t be resolved through your knowledge base, consulting an API, or sending a form, this is a powerful feature to host within a chatbot, because again, it allows you to centralize this information and bring it to the user when they request it.
Available as a shortcut in the chatbot, the experience of these automations is enhanced by being available within the same interface.
In what form?
The conversational aspect
Human-computer interaction with a chatbot is special because it is based on language. The conversational aspect of the chatbot is essential. Even if the “robotic” aspect is clarified with the user, the tone of the bot is important.
As in any linguistic interaction, it is this tone that will allow the user to become attached to this interaction. Thus, closer to the speech of an agent than to a software interface, the UX of a chatbot depends on the conversational capabilities of the latter.
A high-performance NLU
The second factor for a great UX in your chatbot is the ability for your users to find the content they are looking for simply. To do this, you obviously need to organize your resources in a simple and logical way, but more importantly, make sure that your chatbot’s natural language understanding (NLU) is set up very precisely.
No user wants to come across a message like “I can’t help you anymore, have a nice day! “… You need your NLU to be able to handle as many sentence cases as possible from users, and return relevant resources.
A good NLU setup gives access to all your resources easily, reduces user frustration and increases engagement with your bot.
The "no-chat" for speed and accessibility
A great way to make interactions smoother and to limit misunderstandings of the chatbot is to offer a range of “no-chat” interactions, which do not require any sentences from the user.
These interactions are available as buttons on most platformsand even, on the web and on Microsoft Teams, in the form of Adaptive Cards, interaction and content presentation cards that can contain fields, buttons, and even simple audio logic that can make a complex interaction through language very simple by approximating a traditional software experience.
In addition, a button navigation allows the user to keep an interactive cue, again decreasing the frustration that can be related to the novelty of the chatbot experience.
