Transportation is contributing to 29% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. 🚗
Defining the problem
CEO of a certain tech company wants to cut down the carbon emissions caused by the automobiles of office workers daily in commuting,
They have started to offer their employees work-from-home days allowing them to work remotely from their homes.
They want to develop a bot for their office app so that employees can ask for a remote day easily without any hassle of filing applications and paperwork.
Ideation
The idea is to design a smooth user flow to allow users to apply for a remote day. I thought of creating an HR chatbot that can also perform some more operations that can be automated like FAQ and meeting recaps.
What I learned from research
I researched on the internet about AI bots and I found that almost half of the people don’t like it when chatbots try to behave like humans and would prefer bots that behave more bot-like rather than human-like.
Another thing I learned along the way is that most people would rather prefer using a bot to request a remote day than calling up their superiors or writing an application.
The first question to ask ourselves — “What pain point are we trying to solve here? Why are we using a bot? And do we really need to? And how we are going to solve it?
“The why should always come before the how”
The second thing to focus on is the conversational flow of the chatbot. Our chatbot should be user-friendly with an intuitive interface.
“Dont make the user type out or search for everything”
Give suggestions to the user. It makes the process more user-friendly when the user doesn’t have to type in every single thing by themselves. Cues and options can be given to make it easier for the user to find what he’s looking for.
Let the user know you heard them and are working on their request.
Instant feedback on user activity helps to reduce confusion and gives clarity of the ongoing process. It gives the feeling that we are being heard.
Apart from these, researching and gathering more information on chatbots, AI, and how they work is also crucial for designers as we should know the technologies which we are designing for.
Let’s take a look at the chatbot I designed.
It is clear that the AI industry is growing rapidly, and we are going to see a lot of AI-powered chatbots in the next 5 years. The global chatbot market is set to grow at about 37% CAGR between 2017 and 2021.
Therefore, it would be a great time for you (as a designer, developer, or business owner) to learn more about AI and reap its benefits
Thank you for reading my article, give it a clap if you liked it. 🙂