<p>Published on <a href="http://ift.tt/2tcRYeP">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Jens Scharnetzki <img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2td396X">Bot pic by <a href="http://ift.tt/2tVN5DO">http://ift.tt/2tVN5DO</a></p>
<p>Are you thinking about having a chatbot at your company?<br />You want to reduce your expenses in your call center?<br />You would like to enhance the customer experience with this new engagement channel? <br />Or even just looking for some insight how start with a bot.</p>
<h3><strong>Start small and learn fast</strong></h3>
<p>So you’re thinking about building a chatbot?!<br />Where should I start? Which features or services should be within the bot?<br />Should the bot be funny or able to make small talk with your user?<br />A lot of to clarify upfront!<br />But if you keep it small and simple at the beginning, it’s not as difficult as you might think right now.<br />Sounds familiar? Of course, it is widely known that designing and developing in small pieces to iterate and pivot fast is mostly the better plan. <br />(There are a lot of great articles about the topics <strong>MVP</strong>, <strong>LeanUX, Agile </strong>and <strong>Design Thinking</strong> here on <a href="http://ift.tt/1N37Gt5">Medium</a>)<br />And this is unsurprisingly the same with the exploration of how you can interact via a chatbot with your user. <br />It’s like always — it is all about build, measure, learn and pivot.</p>
<h4>Business Goals could be a good starting point…</h4>
<ol>
<li>Enhance your digital customer experience</li>
<li>Lower your cost to serve per customer by providing a automated support channel</li>
<li>Boost your sales</li>
<li>Show how technical up to date your company is — even though the first chatbot is half a century old 😉<br /><a href="http://ift.tt/1mCT6c9">http://ift.tt/1mCT6c9</a></li>
</ol>
<p><img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2tVVOpE">ELIZA Screenshot — The worlds first chatbot developed by Joseph Weizenbaum 1966</p>
<h4>… but being more specific at the beginning, might be better!</h4>
<p>Choose a precise usecase that helps you and your customer and not the high level business goal that you want to achieve at the end of the year.</p>
<p>Remember — You don´t know if your customer will like the bot yet! This is additional aggravated by the fact that you have probably no experience designing and developing a natural conversation between a human and a bot. <br />So better start with a small usecase and prototype it as fast as you can.</p>
<h4><strong>Possible needs of your user that could be handled by a chatbot:</strong></h4>
<ol>
<li>order a ticket</li>
<li>change the payment options</li>
<li>provide details of his contract</li>
<li>subscribe to a newsletter</li>
<li>upgrade his subscription options for his contract</li>
<li>get information e.g about the weather<br />(by the way try <a href="http://ift.tt/2jFj60I">Poncho The Weather Cat</a>)</li>
<li>…</li>
</ol>
<p><img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2tVD5ua"><img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2tcGTKK">Poncho — The famous weather bot (dialogue between my wife <a href="http://ift.tt/2tVQbrp">Verena Scharnetzki</a> and poncho)</p>
<h3>Next step — Make a small test.</h3>
<p><img alt="" src="http://ift.tt/2tdakfs">The “Act before you think” UX Method — <a href="http://ift.tt/2tVEMIn">Arno Karrasch</a> and me. Guess who is the bot:-)</p>
<p>After choosing the usecase, you should start with a very small dirty test of your idea.</p>
<p>So basically the smallest and cheapest test to mimic a natural language interaction is to roleplay the usecase maybe directly with one of your customers.</p>
<h4>A good set up for the test:</h4>
<p>Person A is the user, with a clear task to achieve.<br />Person B plays the bot, trying to help the user.<br />Person C observes the roleplay and is taking notes.</p>
<p>Test the usecase two or three times in the group, till you have a basic feeling how the conversation might look like.<br />Already at this early stage it regularly happens that you develop new ideas and see some obstacles that let you rethink your initial concept and ideas. <br />Pro Tip: Person C should take his notes for each conversation step on a different sticky note. That speeds up the next step in the process.</p>
<h3>The main conversation flow</h3>
<p>This step is important, because the conversation flow is the backbone of your bot. So it is similar to a wireframe for your app.</p>
<p>Stick your sticky notes on a wall. <br />Step a little back and take a look at your results.<br />Discuss the possible junctions and dead ends in your flow in the group. <br />Brainstorm and try to fix some of them, but never forget you want to learn as fast and cheap as you can, so a 80% perfect flow should be fine.</p>
<h3>Building a prototype was never easier</h3>
<p>Today there are so many chatbot development pages that really helps you to build a bot from scratch without even writing one line of code. Therefore it is unnecessarily to use an extra tool to build a prototype. So skip the step and build your bot directly in one of the following tools.</p>
<p>Here a some cool examples to build and publish your first chatbot:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://landbot.io/">Landbot | Convert a Landing Page into a Chatbot</a></li>
<li><a href="https://chatfuel.com/">Create AI Chat Bot for Facebook</a></li>
<li><a href="http://ift.tt/2domyLH">Connect Motion AI to all of your messaging channels and business systems | Smooch</a></li>
<li><a href="https://flowxo.com/">Flow XO: Chatbot platform for cross-platform business messaging apps</a></li>
<li><a href="https://qnamaker.ai/">QnA Maker</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Start small and learn fast</h3>
<p>If you follow these easy approaches &#8211; there isn’t any excuse not to start with your chatbot experience. And soon your bot will do whatever you can imagine. 😉<br />Have fun and share your experiences!</p>
<p><img src="http://ift.tt/2tVWsUh" width="1" height="1" alt="stat?event=post.clientViewed&amp;referrerSou"></p>
<hr>
<p><a href="http://ift.tt/2td2QsQ">You want a chatbot? Read this first.</a> was originally published in <a href="http://ift.tt/2cAqCpx">prototypr</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.</p>


You want a chatbot? Read this first.

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