Designing Conversation

What is Conversation Design?

Conversation Design is a process of designing conversation between the user and operating system based on principles of human-to-human dialogues. Conversation Design's primary goal is to help users complete their activities on a product, whether it is a transaction, a questions-and-answer, or a casual chat. The final result of Conversation Design is a conversational product with a natural and comfortable conversational flow.

How to start designing the conversation

There are 3 stages of designing conversation; requirement stage, high-level design stage, and detailed design stage. Each of them contains a question that you need to answer throughout the design process.

Requirements Stage

Always start your product with a clear goal in the requirement stage. It will help you identify your product’s use case and set the scope of your first phase product. You may start this stage by researching your target audience to help you build a user-friendly conversational AI product.

If you’re confused about whether your product will solve the problem, you may start your research with these 3 basic questions:

1. Is a conversational product an appropriate solution for your product?
2. Does conversational product improve user experience?
3. Does conversational product add real value to your product?

These questions will help you identify what kind of solution you want to build for your end-users problems.

High-level Design Stage

After fulfilling the requirements, the next step is getting into high-level design. Based on the use case, you can break down what are the key features are going to be. Then, with the features figured out, you should map out the content for your conversational UI.

In this stage, you may start designing your first conversation flow. Our Kata Platform is designed to build 3 types of conversational products; keyword-based bot, menu-based bot, and NLP-based bot.

Detailed Design Stage

The last stage is the detailed design, where you can develop a system persona for your conversational product. You can build a tone of voice to help your product stay consistent by creating a persona. Text is the primary medium that conversation designers use to convey messages to users, so good writing is the main key to a smooth user experience. When writing responses for conversational UI, always use plain words, short explanations, and the correct spelling. Remember to write based on your system persona and predefined style guide.