Best practices to design and implement a chatbot user interface and experience that is intuitive and easy to use
Chatbots are becoming an increasingly popular way for people to engage with businesses, as they can provide a convenient and personalized way for customers to get help and support. However, it’s important to design chatbot conversations and experiences carefully to ensure that they are effective and engaging. XAPP AI’s chat experience interface was built using strong design principles as a foundational driver of usage and engagement.
Those principles can be broken down into three key steps to design a chatbot your website visitors will love:
Build trust with visual consistency
One of the most important things you can do to build trust with your chatbot users is to make sure that it has a consistent visual identity with your website. This means using the same colors, fonts, and logos throughout the chatbot conversation.
By using a consistent visual identity, you can help your users feel more comfortable interacting with your chatbot. They will know that they are talking to a legitimate chatbot from your company, and they will be less likely to be suspicious of its motives or question where the information being shared is going.
Continue that consistency by making the conversation feel like your brand, too. Your welcome message to the user is your opportunity to make a strong first impression.
Make it easy to engage
Another important thing to keep in mind when designing your chatbot is to make it easy for users to engage with it. This means having a clear and concise call to action at the beginning of the conversation, presented on the screen in a way where the chat is placed in front of other content on the site. Including a message in the overlay like, “Need help? Click here.” drives engagement without negatively impacting the overall site user experience.
Making it easy also means providing users with multiple ways to interact with the chatbot. Offering up “suggestion chips” is a simple way to get people into a conversation without requiring much effort on the part of the user. These clickable chips along with the ability to type open-ended responses should be the standard.
You should also make sure that your chatbot is responsive and timely. Users should not have to wait long for a response from the chatbot, and they should be able to get help quickly and easily.
Meet the expectations of the conversation
When users interact with your chatbot, they have certain expectations. They expect the chatbot to be helpful, informative, and easy to use. They also expect the chatbot to be able to answer their questions accurately and complete their tasks.
It’s important to design your conversation flow in a way that meets the expectations of your users. This means making sure that the chatbot can answer the most common questions that users have and making sure that the chatbot can complete the most common tasks that users need help with.
One of the ways that we help our customers accomplish this at XAPP AI is by building the knowledge base for the chatbot in a way that is simple and requires little maintenance. As a part of the setup, the website and any related materials are crawled for information. We offer industry-specific FAQs to help supplement any knowledge and regularly crawl the customer site for updates to keep the knowledge base active and up to date.
The best experience in the world loses all value if the information shared isn’t accurate or the task initiated can’t be completed.
By following these three key steps, you can design a chatbot that your website visitors will love. Your chatbot will be helpful, informative, and easy to use. It will also be able to meet the expectations of your users and provide them with the help and support they need.
If you’d like to learn more about how XAPP AI makes it easy to get set up for success, check out our YouTube Training Series below:
