To Use Chatbot Buttons or Not to Use Chatbot Buttons
Balancing AI and UX when building Chatbots
Button-based menus are a popular trend at the moment in chatbot UI/UX. While chatbot buttons can have a profound impact on your chatbot’s success, they should be used responsibly. Excessive use of these buttons can hurt UX and the overall success of your chatbot over time.
AI Should Always be Plan A
Is a chatbot really harnessing the capabilities of AI if it is merely presenting menus of buttons that a user must click as they slowly get closer and closer to their answer? In my opinion, a chatbot like this more so resembles a virtual file hierarchy with a chat-based UI than any form of AI.
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Immediately presenting the user with a bunch of buttons at the beginning of the conversation sets a tone that they should avoid typing a unique question and instead navigate through a question hierarchy. While some users may, in fact, prefer this method, the ideal use case of the chatbot is being cannibalized.
Ideally, the preference should always be that a user gets to their answer by directly typing a question to the chatbot. Not only is this the quickest path to the answer, assuming the chatbot recognizes the correct response, but it provides another piece of data for AI, ML, and NLP to harness.
The more data regarding what questions users are asking and how they’re asking them that flows through the platform, the more AI, ML, and NLP can work together to learn how to best respond to users going forward.
Use Buttons to Overcome AI Failures
As already mentioned, the likely quickest route from a user’s initial question to the ultimate answer is to directly ask the chatbot a question encompassing what they’re looking for. In some instances, or for certain chatbots in many instances, the user is going to ask a question, and an incorrect answer will be provided.
Acknowledging these failures and providing the user with clickable buttons directing to related topics is a perfect example of improving UX with the use of buttons while also not limiting the opportunities for the chatbot’s AI, ML, and NLP to shine.
Another excellent example of improving a chatbot’s UX with buttons is to present a menu of buttons representing high-level topics the chatbot can assist with, after a user’s response contains the word ‘help’. This setup encourages the user to try to type out a question directly but provides the opportunity for them to navigate through the chatbot’s knowledge base with menu buttons if needed or desired.
A chatbot like this is appealing to both significant user preferences while ultimately promoting the ideal use case. It’s hard to get much better than that…
