®2024

AI Chatbot : Context, Personality and Tone

The vision is to design a GenAI-powered chatbot for Salesforce that delivers smooth, conversational interactions while ensuring quick, accurate results. By enabling natural, context-aware dialogue, the chatbot reduces friction. It makes users feel supported and understood, while its focus on speed ensures instant access to the right information, solutions, or workflows.

Client

SALESFORCE

DELIVERABLES

RESEARCH
PROTOTYPES

Year

2024

Role

RESEARCH DESIGN

Chatbots have become redundant

Including the Einstein Chatbot on the Salesforce website. All it can do is connect you to an Agent, which you probably could've done yourself.

But how did it reach this point?

No Contextual Awareness
Most chatbots can't remember context , so they give generic answers or repeat things. It almost feels like you’re talking to a wall.
They lack personality.
Most bots feel robotic or overly scripted, which makes the experience dull and transactional rather than engaging.
They fail at multi-step tasks.
Great at answering a single question, but terrible at carrying a conversation across goals (e.g., browsing, comparing, deciding).

Also…

With AI taking over the Chatbot game, it just didn't make sense to stick to script based Chatbots anymore.

What Salesforce asked of us

Focus of this
Project

Exploring and designing chatbot experiences that leverage GenAI, specifically looking at how these bots can adapt to user needs, provide meaningful interactions

Research
Design
Prototype
Contextual inquiries

"How does a little window like a chatbot, get people to be excited about this experience?"

Salesforce sponsor

Losing
Track of
conversations

Losing Track of
conversations

Scrolling endlessly through lenghthy chats

Expert
Assistance

Frequently escalates to an agent instead of resolving the query directly.

Insufficient
Information

Struggles with one-word queries due to limited context.

Insufficient

Information

Struggles with one-word queries due to limited context.

Issues with the Salesforce Chatbot

No Visual
Hierarchy

Hard to scan and find information or products when responses are long blocks of plain text.

No Visual

Hierarchy

Hard to scan and find information or products when responses are long blocks of plain text.

Our take on these Issues

Clarifying
Questions

It focuses on guiding users to elaborate their entries.

Suggestive
Prompts

A behavioral trigger that activates in certain situations

Chat
Timeline

A timline that lets you revisit old conversations.

Visual
Clarity

Imrpoved visual hierarchy for a smoother experience

Clarifying
Questions

It focuses on guiding users to elaborate their entries.

Suggestive
Prompts

A behavioral trigger that activates in certain situations

Chat
Timeline

A timline that lets you revisit old conversations.

Visual
Clarity

Imrpoved visual hierarchy for a smoother experience

Clarifying
Questions

It focuses on guiding users to elaborate their entries.

Suggestive
Prompts

A behavioral trigger that activates in certain situations

Chat
Timeline

A timline that lets you revisit old conversations.

Visual
Clarity

Imrpoved visual hierarchy for a smoother experience

How we got here

Lots of
User testing!

Multiple bouts of user testing using Chat-GPT and Amazon's Rufus as our primary tool.

4+ Feedback
Sessions

The feedback and critiques we received helped us iterate, clarify our direction, and develop the final solution.

📅

Days later

10+ Probes

As part of our user research, we leveraged ChatGPT to explore the impact of tone and personality on user interactions.

10+
Contextual
Inquiries

These helped us identify the gaps in current tech. and understand user expectations in context of a chatbot in todays age.

Protocols and Insights from probes/interviews etc.
Sketches based on different insights we got from contextual inquiries, probes and secondary research.