“Love without conversation is impossible.”
— Mortimer Adler

If you want your users to love your chatbot, then a great conversational UX is exactly what you need.

Conversational UX is the new buzzword. The reasons are obvious: the immense popularity of apps with conversational interfaces (e.g., messaging apps) and the rise of chatbots on Kik, Slack, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and many others. Also a lot of DIY bot makers like API.ai, Wit.ai, Chatfuel, and Manychat have arisen, which makes it really easy for a business or an individual to build and deploy bots on any platform (the most popular being Facebook Messenger).

But the sad part in all of this is that people still do not know how to talk to a chatbot. A bad conversational UX makes it even harder.

My colleague Rishabh Bose and I recently built our own chatbot, Kukie, which recommends startup resources to you on Facebook Messenger. About 3,000 people have talked to Kukie, generating over 100,000 messages in the past 4 weeks.

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Based on what we’ve learned so far, I would like to share with you a few tips on how to build a lovable and talkative chatbot.

Set the context of the conversation. Remember there is no onboarding for a chatbot in Facebook Messenger. Make sure you let people know what the bot can do and why it exists.
Plan for basic keywords. Use the default message for when the bot does not know the answer (such as asking for more information) to guide a user to try more keywords with the bot. Also plan for basic keywords like Home, Settings, and Help as part of the chat.
Be prepared for the tire kickers. More than they’re interested in the actual use case of the bot, the early users love to test a bot to its wit’s end. Be prepared for all such queries.
It’s like they won’t stop testing. Don’t try to make the chatbot learn everything. Focus on your specific use case. Users can ask anything. Plan for it in advance and use this opportunity to make your users explore your bot even more.
The UX is now just two lines. Make the most of them so that they always encourage the user to explore (irrespective of the query) and they are able to communicate to the user what the next actions are.
Buttons get the job done just right. Use buttons in Messenger to define your UX in a more articulate manner. They can help a user explore the chatbot in a way they are familiar with.
Use visual cues — they always work. We used high-quality stock images to define each category, subcategory, and sub-subcategory to visually guide the user to what they are looking for. Pictures make the entire journey visual and easy to navigate.
People love to talk. If your bot encourages them to share more, guides them to what they came looking for, and keeps it friendly, users are sure to leave with a smile and come back for more.

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