Monday was our final presentation for our chatbot, “Charlie” for our Designing Innovation class.
For Qinyu and I, getting to this place was not easy but it sure was a lot of fun with loads of lessons learned along the way, but before I dive into those lessons, below is our final presentation to our class, our professor, Lien Tran and our guest, Rebekah Monson.
You can also view our prototype of Charlie.“There are some quirks, as it is only our second iteration but we think it gives a good sense of “Role and Look and Feel”, two types of prototypes and the relationship between them. [1] Implementation, a third type of prototype would be the next big leap; something I would love to make happen. (Note: as serious as this post was intended, I could not help but think of Captain Picard in Star Trek, “Make it so”)
Lessons Learned
Lessons learned is something I have lodged in my brain since teaching my own students at Newhouse. For nearly every project submission, I asked them to submit 3-5 lessons learned to get to know them at first; to understand what they need to learn, and to understand their thinking.
Now that I am a student (again), below are mine and I hope to write more and in more detail about these in the near future since during this project, I not only got a hairline fracture in my dominant hand but also severe tendonitis from repetitive trackpad use!
Anyway, here is one of the big takeaways so far. I’ll write more later as I’m eager to share in case others may find my experience helpful.
Conversation is the User Experience
I can no longer recall what my expectations (assumptions may be a more appropriate word) were when I came up with “Charlie” but I read a lot online about designing chatbots and while I was drawing out (ok, attempting to draw) out storyboards, it dawned on me that my time would better be used writing.
This article, Therapy via conversational design by Kathleen Varghese and the documentation for Google Assistant, IBM Watson and various other sources (Thank you everyone who publishes on Medium) were critical to my learning since I was not enrolled in any course about chatbots or artificial intelligence. (Note: Dr. Ching-Hua Chuan, PhD., is our expert on campus and I did speak with her a few times and need to more.)
Given the minimal UI of a chatbot, the conversational flow between bot and user is mission critical. That seemed like a no-brainer when it hit me but up until that moment, I was still thinking visually.
So for anyone new to chatbot design, focus on the words and tone to give your bot the appropriate personality for your target audience.
References
[1] Houde, S., & Hill, C. (1997). What do prototypes prototype?. In Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction (Second Edition)(pp. 367-381).