The Next Phase Of UX: Designing Chatbot Personalities

You may have heard that "conversational interfaces" are the new hotness in digital product design. Why open and close a bunch of apps on your phone to get stuff done when you can invoke a text-message-like window and just say what you want done to a chatbot? Well, here's one reason: what if the bot is annoying or tedious to talk to? In conversational UIs, personality is the new UX. "We want people to enjoy dealing with our software, but now we have a very limited palette with which to design the experience," says Ben Brown, co-founder of Howdy, a "digital coworker" chatbot that runs within the office communication tool Slack and automates things like project-status meetings and taking lunch orders.