Conversational Design: Fundamentals for Strengthening Your Website Interactions

As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, businesses plan on implementing conversational design elements into their website experience. Essentially, designers incorporate conversational design to strengthen human-AI interaction.

With remote capabilities getting stronger heading into 2022, brands try to automate their process through the usage of chatbots. When effectively implemented, not only do these components smooth out the customer experience, they also save time for everyone involved in the interaction.

Understanding the Fundamentals of Conversational Design

For those considering implementing conversational design elements into their online presence, it’s important to first understand it, conceptually. To summarize, “conversation design (CxD) is about defining the interactions between the user and a conversational agent, based on how people communicate in real life”.

For many, they think of widespread tech tools, such as Siri and Alexa. While speech is an important component of conversational design, it isn’t the only component. Like any human interaction, conversations revolve widely around the context of what’s being stated.

For these purposes, having chat functionality allows website users to engage with a business. In these interactions, users often opt from a few preselected choices to facilitate the interaction. As an example, someone reaching out to Squarespace customer support may first indicate that the conversation is related to billing. Based on this choice, the preprogrammed AI funnels the user down a conversational path, expediting the support process.

Principles of Conversational Design Elements

Because of the overall complexity of conversational design (and human interaction, entirely), certain principles act as a measuring stick for a successful design implementation. Digital design app Marvel identifies eight key principles:

  1. Cooperation

  2. Goal-Orientation

  3. Context-Aware

  4. Quick & Clear

  5. Turn-Based

  6. Truthful

  7. Polite

  8. Error-Tolerant

Like any strong human interaction, Artificial Intelligence should strive to operate within a set of rules that enables the user to feel heard while successfully collaborating to achieve an objective.

Summary

As technology continues to progress at its fastest pace in history, streamlining interactions becomes more and more important. Even a few years ago, AI was said to increase operational efficiency by 25%.

With brands seeking to embolden their online tools, conversational design marks another area for growth in 2022. For help with designing your website presence, contact the digital marketing specialists at Rizzo Young Marketing.