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Designing conversations

Overview​

Designing sample conversations support chatbot persona creation and focuses specifically on the user journey. Dialogs should both reflect user journeys and make the expected chatbot interactions transparent for the whole team. Use your dialogs to highlight the complex interactions required for your industrial software and then use them train your chatbot to handle these multifaceted industrial scenarios.

It’s not possible or necessary to create hundreds of sample dialogs. Focus on the main industrial use cases, user intent within their industrial working environment, and the most common communicative functions required by your users. We’ve added the most common here with example dialogs. Either use these directly if they match your industrial use case or adapt them to your needs.

Preparation​

  1. Collect brand voice and tone guidelines
  2. Design user personas and user journeys
  3. List required communicative functions for your industrial scenario, such as:
    • Explaining step-by-step instructions for installing a device
    • Clarifying instructions that make consequential changes to a system
    • Transferring users to human support when unable to help
    • Recognizing urgent and complex queries
  4. Select two people to read aloud all dialogs to test for natural-sounding and authentic interactions
  5. Edit and re-write as needed until they best represent your user and the chatbot responses they need
  6. Implement using NLP tools

Assumptions​

  1. You are creating dialogs specific to an industrial context
  2. You know the domain and language used by users
  3. You have a clear user journey and personas to support dialog creation
  4. You have your own brand voice and tone guidelines

Dos and Don'ts​

  • Do create example conversations based on user personas
  • Do focus on industrial-relevant communicative functions
  • Do offer users an exit or calls to action to support further actions
  • Don’t forget to read aloud your dialogs; if it sounds robotic, it is robotic
  • Don’t create lengthy monologues, instead keep responses concise and simple