Building Beautiful Bots

With more than 100,000 chatbots built on the Facebook Messenger platform alone, industry experts are claiming bots as the next big frontier in tech. Beautiful bots delight us. In this hands-on talk, Jayneil will share his journey for designing chatbots for IA Summit and Big Design conferences to reduce the workload on the conference organizers.

Attendees will then learn basic design principles to make their bots beautiful with the help of live demos and interviews Jayneil conducted with award-winning chatbots like Howdy, Poncho, Growbot.

Transcript

1. Building Beautiful Bots @jayneildalal
3. There is more work to be done then there are volunteers at community run conferences.
6. What is the wifi password? Is there any gluten free food? Where is the restroom? Is there free parking? Where is registration?
7. How Might We design a chatbot to reduce the workload on conference organizers?
10. Bots are software powered users that live inside our chat apps — we converse and interact with bots using text, buttons, voice, and other rich controls.
15. Beautiful products delight us.
16. Random Access Navigation [R.A.N.]
18. Can I get a latte with soy milk and make it extra chocolatey. Actually make it with almond milk. Great! Almond milk it is!
19. Actually make it with almond milk. What type of milk? Got it! Can I get a latte please? Soy milk Additional flavors? Extra chocolate I don’t understand Start over you dumb bot!
21. Give people the ability to navigate without a defined path, while also being able to change their mind at any time. Shane Mac, founder of Assist
23. When it comes to having an interactive, conversational character, you must understand your character, your product, and the limitations of user experience provided by other platforms. Greg Leuch, Head of Product at Poncho
28. A designer should always strive to ship a Minimum Delightful Product(MDP) over a Minimum Viable Product(MVP).
33. Artificial Intelligence
36. Be As Smart As A Puppy [B.A.S.A.A.P.]
37. Making smart things that don’t try to be too smart and fail, and indeed, by design, make endearing failures in their attempts to learn and improve. Like puppies. Matt Jones
39. Accessibility was our top priority, and by going with an animal instead of humanoid we saved ourselves from problems of gender, race and other representation issues that limits adoption. Rachel Law, cofounder of Kip
44. You know nobody really wants to read a help system more than they need to to get that thing done. An easy to use help system for Howdy was an early design consideration. We have also made our help actionable. Ben Brown, founder and CEO of Howdy.ai
48. It's super important to be as close to your users as possible and allowing them the ability to give feedback through your bot. Jeremy Vandehey, CEO of Growbot
49. big d bot Big Design Bot
54. Machine Learning
68. We don’t need permission or expertise to give back to the community.
70. Article: Ultimate Guide to Chatbots Article: Random Access Navigation Article: Bot Analytics Article: How Poncho became the best bot Blog: Howdy.ai Book: Design by Change Book: Designing Bots Video: Making of Poncho Video: Talkabot Conference 2016 Website: Chatbot Design resources
72. Jayneil Dalal @jayneildalal jd@jayneildal.al www.jayneildal.al