Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Jens Scharnetzki Bot pic by http://ift.tt/2tVN5DO

Are you thinking about having a chatbot at your company?
You want to reduce your expenses in your call center?
You would like to enhance the customer experience with this new engagement channel?
Or even just looking for some insight how start with a bot.

Start small and learn fast

So you’re thinking about building a chatbot?!
Where should I start? Which features or services should be within the bot?
Should the bot be funny or able to make small talk with your user?
A lot of to clarify upfront!
But if you keep it small and simple at the beginning, it’s not as difficult as you might think right now.
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.
(There are a lot of great articles about the topics MVP, LeanUX, Agile and Design Thinking here on Medium)
And this is unsurprisingly the same with the exploration of how you can interact via a chatbot with your user.
It’s like always — it is all about build, measure, learn and pivot.

Business Goals could be a good starting point…

Enhance your digital customer experience
Lower your cost to serve per customer by providing a automated support channel
Boost your sales
Show how technical up to date your company is — even though the first chatbot is half a century old 😉
http://ift.tt/1mCT6c9

ELIZA Screenshot — The worlds first chatbot developed by Joseph Weizenbaum 1966

… but being more specific at the beginning, might be better!

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.

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.
So better start with a small usecase and prototype it as fast as you can.

Possible needs of your user that could be handled by a chatbot:

order a ticket
change the payment options
provide details of his contract
subscribe to a newsletter
upgrade his subscription options for his contract
get information e.g about the weather
(by the way try Poncho The Weather Cat)
…

Poncho — The famous weather bot (dialogue between my wife Verena Scharnetzki and poncho)

Next step — Make a small test.

The “Act before you think” UX Method — Arno Karrasch and me. Guess who is the bot:-)

After choosing the usecase, you should start with a very small dirty test of your idea.

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.

A good set up for the test:

Person A is the user, with a clear task to achieve.
Person B plays the bot, trying to help the user.
Person C observes the roleplay and is taking notes.

Test the usecase two or three times in the group, till you have a basic feeling how the conversation might look like.
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.
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.

The main conversation flow

This step is important, because the conversation flow is the backbone of your bot. So it is similar to a wireframe for your app.

Stick your sticky notes on a wall.
Step a little back and take a look at your results.
Discuss the possible junctions and dead ends in your flow in the group.
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.

Building a prototype was never easier

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.

Here a some cool examples to build and publish your first chatbot:

Start small and learn fast

If you follow these easy approaches – there isn’t any excuse not to start with your chatbot experience. And soon your bot will do whatever you can imagine. 😉
Have fun and share your experiences!

You want a chatbot? Read this first. was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You want a chatbot? Read this first.

Cool stuff, every week

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