Designing Bots

Chapter 6. Branding, Personality, and Human Involvement

A man’s character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.

—MARK TWAIN

DESIGNING A BOT INVOLVES a lot of thinking about meta aspects of the interface. In the same way defining a color schema and animations (graphical transformations of elements) takes time in mobile app design, defining the branding guidelines, understanding the personality we want to expose, sorting out the naming conventions we want to use, and outlining the human processes that will support our bots takes time during the bot design process.

Many aspects of a bot’s design are tied to the way we want users to perceive our service or product—in essence, we need to figure out the branding of our bot. Let’s explore that now.

Branding

Brand management is all about managing how your clients and users in the market perceive your product or service. Branding makes your users remember and love your product, come back and use your service. Branding makes them recognize your bot amongst a sea of others, and even helps with conversions to paying users (users tend to buy more from well-known brands).

Branding includes the names and language you use, the logos and colors, how you provide the service, and in many cases how your service handles situations where things go wrong. Let’s discuss a few aspects of the bot that impact its branding and the service it exposes.

Visual Branding

Whenever you go into an Apple Store, you appreciate that branding ...