Project Overview
Role: UX Designer
Team: UX Designer, Design lead, Developers
Specs: 3 weeks, Chatbot redesign
Summary:
TracFone (before being acquired by Verizon) has 9 telephone brands under their umbrella company and were ready to redesign and update their chatbots. Starting with Verizon and then applying the best practices to all other chatbots- we began to tackle the UX and the conversational UX - in order to improve the usability of this conversational channel. It was a large effort of this team of designers and developers to work closely together in every step due to the heavy back-end nature of this project. It learned a lot of back-end “language” and ended up absorbing a lot of new knowledge and sympathy for this side of the process.
Research
To begin I did a deep search to get familiar with bots of our competitors and some who are creating great chatbot experiences. What are they doing correctly? How do I feel using the chatbot? Is the experience/language pleasant to use? My findings helped me outline best practices, great designs, and direct language that will be presented to the team for clear direction next steps.
Low-Level User Flow
I created a low level flow chart for the introduction section I was going to work on first. By low level, I mean the dialogue or the action and response between the user and the bot. One of the challenges I had with this project was learning all the back-end heavy information that was on the master flow for the chatbot (calling the NLP engine, API’s, etc.). To say there was a steep learning curve is to put it lightly, luckily, what worked was the very sympathetic and understanding team and leadership directing this project. Once I had the intro flow complete, I used Miro to jot down all my thoughts, observations and organize my ideas and plan.
One of the key data points we were able to retrieve from the analytics team was that 73% of chatbot users were current customers. This gave us an opportunity to enhance the experience of the customers with specific actions they can select right away. For example, “activate SIM card” or “Refill card”. We will also create a script with this scenario in mind.