Conversational UX design helps understand the pattern of human interaction with machines and digital systems to create a design for more productive engagement. As an everyday web user, have you ever interacted with a bot for your queries? According to reports, the chatbots market is likely to grow to over $994 million in 2023. The recent trend and craze for Chat GPT-4 indicate the future of conversation between chatbots and humans.

People interact with Google's Assistant, Apple's Siri, and Amazon's Alexa for routine tasks like reading news, playing music, etc., showcasing the increasing importance of chatbots. Therefore, the need for better engagement and interaction with digital devices will continue to rise. Conversational design is used for developing natural interaction between digital systems and humans using fundamental principles. If experts execute these principles correctly, it can create a real-time interactive experience for communicating with devices.

Conversational Design for Businesses

Conversational design is the concept of designing a mechanism that instructs chatbots and virtual assistants for natural human interaction. The expert analyses human interaction patterns with digital systems to enhance the communication experience. They use principles of Interaction design to develop a better experience for AI and human interaction. Conversational design understands and guides bots to communicate with humans in the most natural way possible.

For instance, many eCommerce websites like Amazon use voice searches to help users find their products from large categories. With an increasing number of mobile website users, the use of voice searches and assistants is also increasing simultaneously. In a Survey conducted in 2022, 50% of US consumers use voice search every day. Moreover, by 2026 voice assistant users are likely to reach 157.1 million users. This pinpoints the need to use voice assistants on websites to increase engagement. Conversational UX design plays a key role in developing voice searches, voice assistants, and chatbots to enhance the communication between digital devices and humans.

What is Conversational Design, and Why Do We Need It?

Conversational design is a new term for many people, but in the coming years, it's going to become a popular full-time job, especially with the rise in voice assistants, virtual assistants, chatbots, and other AI technology.

The UX interactive design is critical for any business and should be analysed to implement better solutions regularly. By analysing patterns, User experience design experts can enhance the communication experience with devices. However, why are these important? What exactly does interaction design contribute to businesses? There are numerous reasons, but we are shortlisting some key aspects that will help you understand its worth.

Foundation to improve the experience for your Customers

Do you feel frustrated when customer support does not pick up your call or has a busy line? Yes! Right? Nobody likes to wait. Chatbots used on websites are a way to improve the user experience for customers. Users can interact with bots about basic queries and details about products on your website. A UX design on a website grabs attention and builds an emotional conversation with your customer, similar to humans. Interaction design helps in improving the way your customers interact with chatbots.

Customers' insights for process design systems

Needless to say, customer information can help you in numerous ways. But how do you collect customer insights? Through cookies, observing customer behaviour on websites? UX design can be a better and more engaging way to collect information such as phone numbers, names, and other basic details. When you collect data via chatbot, customers feel they are interacting with a human. It's more interesting and interactive for them. Later, you can use data to polish your marketing.

Principles of Conversational Design

Conversations are bound with psychology; to make your design more interactive, you must follow the principles of UX design. These are 8 principles to follow when designing chatbots and voice assistants:

#1 Cooperative: Cooperative principle says to follow the flow of healthy human conversation. To make successful and natural communication with digital devices, both parties should be equally involved. For instance, when your customer asks a query, the answer should not be long paragraphs or stories. Just what is asked. Your customers should not feel they are putting too much effort into the conversation with your bots.

#2 Goal orientation: Why exactly do you want to create a chatbot or voice assistant? Ask this question to yourself. If you have an answer, that is your goal to create bots. If not, then how will you know what your customer is looking for? Or whether they have got an answer from your chatbot and voice search or not? Your customer is looking for products, and you are providing a refund solution; there's no point then.

#3 Context-aware: Prepare your conversations and the context of those conversations. If your design is aware of different conversational contexts and understands tones, styles, and languages, it would be easy to handle a human conversation.

#4 Quick & clear: Don't beat around the bush; your customer's time is precious. So, use plain language and provide quick and clear answers. Pre-defined answers or questions in this regard come in handy. Your customer asks you a question; you have to reply within seconds.

#5 Turn-based: Let's understand this way, to flow a healthy conversation among people, there are turns for listening and speaking. One person listens and responds; the other speaks and listens to the response. Your design should be in such a way that it looks like a normal conversation. Do not use long monologues; paragraphs allow your customer to take their turn speaking or asking their query.

#6 Truthful: Truthful means you have to be true and trustworthy to your customer in conversation. Do not use deception or force them into something that will create a bad impression and reduce user experience. For instance, do not force your customer to buy your product or service or deceive them into creating accounts. That is not a natural conversation, but forceful by ai.

#7 Polite: You got a Query, You got a potential customer, You got a repeat customer, Your customers have too many questions, we understand. But that doesn't mean your conversation design provides rude or disrespectful answers. No matter how many times your customer asks the same question, your design should provide polite and respectful answers. Your design will align with business goals when your customers are happy.

#8 Error-Tolerant: We all make mistakes, right? So, there is a 100% chance your customers will make mistakes during the conversation. Therefore, your design should be Error-Tolerant; either ask again what they meant or round off-their errors. For instance, they wrote ‘heelo’ instead of ‘hello’; your design should understand what they meant.

Conversation Design Fundamental

Implementation of principles and fundamentals of conversation design in a balanced way is critical to driving results. When you are designing your chatbot or voice assistants, a few fundamentals will keep everything in check. What are those fundamentals? Let's find out:

• Defining the purpose and scope of your conversation for design. As a business, you must set common grounds for your chatbot or assistants. Such as chatbots to solve queries and voice assistants to search for products on websites.
  
  
• Defining a set persona of your design. Defining the character of your chatbot or assistant, which means the type of language styles, tones, and words it will use.
  
  
• Using more natural language: When a customer interacts with your AI design, they do not know what are your defined standards. They will interact in their natural tone. To make your AI or UX design more realistic, your language should be as natural as possible. Using technical words will make your customers frustrated.
  
  
• Creativity with your UX design can be a unique aspect of your website. Such as using images and sound somewhere rather than only relying on text.
  
  
• Predefined questions: If you are designing a conversation bot, it means you already have your customer data. Since you already know, why not use it to create possible questions your customer might ask on your website? For instance, give them options between the most common questions asked on your website. You can provide them with the answer they are looking for, making it easy for them and you.
  
  
• Testing and rectifying: Test your design, identify gaps, and rectify your mistakes. According to Business Insider, 60% of consumers believe that chatbots do not understand their queries. So, identify these issues in your design and rectify them for a satisfying experience.

Process of Conversational Design

To implement the principles and fundamentals of conversation design to process design systems, UX designers must follow these steps. We are enlisting some common steps for designing chatbots and voice assistants as follows:

Goals, Research, Topics Mapping, and User Persona: The first step to building an interactive and natural conversation design is its goal- Why do you need it? Research the chatbots and voice assistants- how they work, what your website needs, and what your customers expect. Research and goals will help you outline your topics for design which means common areas where your customers can ask you questions. On a web design website, a customer will not ask for jewellery, right? That's why goals and research are important. User persona refers to defining a character of your design, tone, and style through research.

Define flow design: When you know what personality your bot will have and what it will talk or communicate about, it's time to set flow design. Flow design means defining the architecture for everything your UX design will follow, from topics to tone and Predefined questions.

Prototype and Feedback: Develop a prototype and acquire feedback from your limited audience. Analyse what they need, identify gaps and mistakes, rectify mistakes, and improve your design.

Get your design ready for launch: Release the final design and monitor it for some time to ensure it gives you the results you are looking for.

Myths Surrounding Conversational Design

As much as interactive design and chatbots are gaining popularity in today’s era, there are many myths surrounding them. Some are very common, so much so that they seem absolutely true. Others are often unpopular, known only to the most eminent professionals in the field. In this section, let us debunk the top 5 myths surrounding this field and understand more about how you can use UX designs to their maximum efficiency.

Myth 1: All bots use AI

Despite popular belief, not all chatbots are built on top of or use AI to any extent. Some chatbots merely follow a predefined set of steps. Conversely, we have chatbots that rely on underdeveloped AI models. This decreases the quality of output since the data fed to the bot is also low-degree. The ideal AI chatbot uses the power of AI to recognise distinct consumer intents, such as a switch in language, while guiding the user through a interactive design experience.

Myth 2: Voice is all there is to conversational UX design

The most common misconception regarding conversational UX design is that a conversation designer simply needs to pay attention to the words their agent uses. Yet, there are several variations on the conversational UX design theme, such as voice-only, voice-forward, and multimodal. Moreover, conversation experiences can extend across many channels, from mobile phones and smart speakers to the web.

Myth 3: It's simplest to implement conversational AI using pre-made templates

This is also not always true. Conversational AI can be customised to fulfil the precise needs of a business or customer and is the most effective approach for desired results. But when you use a pre-made AI framework, it eliminates the possibility of customisation. Furthermore, since the AI lacks versatile learning capabilities, you will need to spend a considerable amount of time training it by feeding it dialogues. Using this model would also be a terrible experience for the clients. Finally, security is an issue when using a conversational AI template that is pre-built.

Myth 4: Design has nothing to do with chatbots

This is another common myth that runs around the principles of conversational design and their application. The truth is that effective UX design is an essential part of a successful chatbot model. This is because it enhances the user experience in many ways. With conversational UX design, you can create an experience for the users that is both engaging and effective.

Myth 5: All conversational design experts are the same

Not true! There are many different types of design experts with various specialisations. Each of these professionals has unique skills and knowledge that can help businesses create a successful chatbot experience. That is why it is important for businesses to take multiple factors into consideration before choosing the right professional or agency for all their UX design needs.

Best practices for Conversational UX Design

Now that you know everything about user experience design, you would be wanting to use it for your business. But before you go ahead and hire some experts, you should be aware of the best practices for conversational UX design in current times. Here’s a roundup of the top 4 ones:

1. Keep conversations natural: Creating interactions that feel as natural as possible is one of the best methods to guarantee a satisfying conversational experience. Specifically, this necessitates the employment of context-appropriate language and imagery.
   
   
2. Focus on solving problems: One of the main goals of conversational UX design is to solve user problems. This means providing relevant and helpful information in a way that is easy to understand.
   
   
3. Integrate conversational memory into the chatbot: The capacity to build a chatbot with conversational memory is a major advantage of conversational UX design. This implies the chatbot can learn from the user's past discussions and tailor its responses accordingly.
   
   
4. Use the appropriate tone of voice: Communicate effectively by adopting a tone that is warm, polite, and engaging. Don't turn users off with grandiose language or confusing terminology.

Final Thoughts

Conversational design is the core of chatbots and voice assistants which makes them more effective and interactive for users. With the use of certain principles and fundamentals, it brings the mechanism to life. Thus, improving the effectiveness and interaction between digital devices and humans.