When chatbots fail, it's the designer that's fault. These 5 considerations will help you avoid common chatbot errors while ensuring an optimized user experience.

1. Avoiding Dead Ends

Oct 18, 2017

In every chatbot, users are navigating their way through paths. To make this smooth and prevent early exits, it's highly important to avoid serving them content that does not contain actionable next steps. Even if you serve a link designed to take users outside of the chatbot you should still include some sort of suggested responses that will be there when they return. Otherwise, they'll hit a dead end, and be off to the next thing with little consideration of returning to your chatbot.

2. Breadth of Capabilities

Oct 18, 2017

It's tempting to try and make your chatbot do everything. Unfortunately, very few designers are capable of successfully doing so.

When you set out to build a chatbot, you should first set out what its core tasks will be. Designing before doing this will lead to a sloppy, unfocused product. It's much better for your chatbot to do one thing extremely well than a bunch of things decently.