The Power of Suggestion
Yina Smith-Danenhower
Novice chatbot users are often unfamiliar with its capabilities – what it can do, and what it can’t do, or simply how to phrase their question. This causes a poor user experience interacting with chatbots. We introduced autocomplete suggestions within our chatbots. Autocomplete is not a new concept: Google, Amazon, and many other commerce sites have excellent autocomplete suggestions that help users complete their queries. In this use case though, it is a little different as it is in a chatbot. The goal is not to help users find a product, the goal is to give suggestions on what the user can ask and get answers to, with a preview of the answer to common FAQs, speeding up the search process and improving the experience.
We set out to solve this problem using our own widget design. One of the major use cases of chatbots is to find answers to common questions quickly. There are also more complex use cases of a more transactional nature. We tested both of them in a pull-up drawer.
Use Case 1-
Frequently Asked Questions
The hover state allows users to preview part of the answer, helping them determine if a certain FAQ is what they are looking for before committing to the full answer. This ensures users get answers that are highly relevant to their queries.
Use Case 2- Transactions
In order to allow suggestions of intent-based queries, while allowing users to customize to their own needs, we used a rectangular indicator to guide the users to type in their own information before sending to the bot to search, further speeding up the search process.
Usability Tests
We tested the autocomplete bot with 13 participants using User Interview. Overall Analysis: Users found autocomplete suggestions to be helpful (11/13), easy to navigate (12/13), and visually appealing (12/13)
Feedback from Participants
– “It showed me what responses/questions are preloaded so I could save time and click as opposed to typing.”
– “I liked the search bar suggestions that came up when I was typing my questions. The search bar spurred me to ask other similar types of questions as well.”
– “The suggestions were very helpful in identifying questions I hadn’t thought of but wanted an answer to.”
– “Search bar suggestions were helpful in narrowing down topics. After a few words in the question, usually the topic I’m interested in is suggested.”
The autocomplete feature comes with any XAPP chatbot solutions, it is offered to all customers with our base package. Contact us to discuss how we can help any size business launch Conversational AI experiences that people want to use.
