How bots fit into your app’s UX

This post is adapted from the Reinventing mobile UX with bots strategy guide, on how brands can use conversational UI to deliver more engaging mobile experiences.

When considering how bots can integrate into an existing app or service’s user experience, it’s important to note that the changeover to embrace the bots-centric conversational UI paradigm doesn’t have to be total. The chat bot–type interface is flexible, and can extend to include as much or as little of a digital product’s experience as makes sense for the user. There are three primary ways that bots can be integrated into a mobile user experience.

Bots can become the core user experience for certain types of apps. This doesn’t work for every app’s user experience, but some apps can afford to reinvent themselves to be fully conversational UI–focused. This works best for apps and products that already feel conversational, rather than transactional, where the primary methods of user feedback and interaction are a give-and-take of information between the human and the system. If this experience can be made to feel more personal through a chat bot–like interface, then rethinking the primary UX around a text conversation could make a lot of sense.

Bots can be integrated into an app to support one feature or functionality. While not every app can support a conversational UI approach as the primary interaction model, some specific features of those apps translate well to a text-based chat bot UI. For example, if the primary function of the app’s user experience is best represented as a traditional button- or table-view–centric interface, but there’s a customer support portal that requires two-way communication between the user and the app, it could lend itself well to a chat-bot-style UX makeover. Further, if the on-boarding flow for a particular app is long and arduous, requiring the user to complete several forms and volunteer information about themselves in a specific order, a chat bot can make that process feel lightweight and friendly rather than boring or intimidating. Again, this doesn’t work for every app, but many larger mobile products have areas or features that could be better represented as a conversation.

According to data from the Evercore Group in the Wall Street Journal, capturing half of the predicted business for customer support via a messaging interface would represent a brand-new revenue opportunity of $4 billion for brands.

Bots can be an extension of your app or service within third-party platforms. This approach is perhaps the lowest barrier to entry for third-party developers, but one of the toughest justifications for inserting a chat bot interface for a mobile product into users’ lives. Bots can extend the product’s services or data into third-party platforms like Facebook Messenger, Slack, or even Siri with SiriKit in iOS 10. Each of these platforms comes with its own strengths and limitations, but integrating digital services into new contexts like messaging platforms presents an opportunity to interact with customers in the apps they already use. For users, it’s much easier to strike up a conversation with your brand in the Messenger app they already have installed rather than seeking out your app on the App Store and waiting for it to download.

So how should brands approach this problem, and determine how bots would best intersect with their mobile products? For starters, it’s important to consider how and where users already expect to interact with your brand, your services, or your data. Considering users’ contexts when they seek out the services your digital product provides can help qualify or eliminate any of the places bots could be incorporated into your experience. If users need quick and easy access to your app’s data, perhaps adding a Messenger bot and other bot environments to your brand’s digital portfolio makes sense. However, if users only have a conversational relationship with your brand when they’re seeking out one-on-one customer support, perhaps adding a chat bot help line as one feature of a larger mobile experience is a better option.

Gartner has predicted that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with a business without talking to a human, leaning instead on automated analysis of social media channels, CRM software, and personalized chat bots.

Secondly, it’s critically important to be mindful of providing bot-like assistance only when users actually need or request it, and avoid nagging users with unhelpful or irrelevant messages. The infamous Clippy character from Microsoft Word is a perfect example of what is ostensibly a “chat bot” verging on the annoying. The reason users hated Clippy wasn’t just that he was so often wrong—offering help with composing a letter when users had no intention of writing one—but it was because if a bot isn’t providing any real value, and instead is just a gimmick, it’s a nuisance that can sour users’ perceptions of your app. Before anything else, brands need to identify a place where a conversational UI can provide real value to users, and that may be within the confines of an app or website, and it may be outside of them.