Designing Bots

Chapter 14. Design Process Overview

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

—STEVE JOBS

IN THIS SECTION of the book, we will be moving from theory to practice. We will explore an actual use case and go through the design process of making this use case a reality. We will also explore different ways to iterate and improve the design once it is done through user feedback.

Talking to several product managers and bot designers has made it clear that there is no single process that works for everyone. I will try to lay out a process that works for many use cases, but you should explore and figure out the best process for you.

The Steps

Here are the core steps that we will demonstrate in the following chapters:

Use case definition and exploration

In Chapter 15 we will describe the purpose and functionality we need to design, and attempt to understand the persona and get clarity on the brand and other attributes that might impact the design. We will then make a basic analysis of decisions based on the use case data, drawing on some early-stage experimentation.

Conversation scripting

In Chapter 16 we will start writing the basic drafts of the scripts for the use case workflows. We will explore where we think we will use rich interaction and rich controls, and where we will use plain text conversation.

Designing and testing

In Chapter 17 we will demonstrate how to design different aspects of our use case. We will experiment with a few design tools and explore the ...