But the game has turned around very quickly! ?

1. Relentlessly search ?

Don't speak the language? No problem at all: Google Translator is there 4 u ?

2. Benchmark

The page of the NN/g Nielsen Norman Group, a world reference in design, explains the whole process in 6 steps:

1. Choose what to measure: focus on the key metrics that best reflect the quality of the user experience you’re interested in evaluating.
2. Decide how to measure: will it be quantitative or qualitative research?
3. Collect first measurement and establish baseline
4. Redesign the product: collect additional measurement
5. Interpret findings
6. Calculate ROI (as an optional action)

3. Listening to ?

Do u wanna improve your listening skills? So, pay attention to 3 principles:

1. Empathy (truly understanding the other person's point of view).
2. Investigative questions.
3. Validation of understanding (knowing if you really understood the other person's message by asking questions like "I understood such information, is it really what I meant?").

4. Planning ?

Excellent!!! ? Then, and only then, comes the time to start designing the flows.

For this moment, here are some tips used by the experts at everis Virtual Agents, the department responsible for virtual assistant :

• Build personas that represent your target audience: collect all the data gathered in the research and outline all the profiles that will relate to the virtual assistant. Most of the time, it is more than one. For example, in a bank, there are the executive, the housewife, the student, and countless social classes... To each one of them, create a kind of character, with name, nationality, where they live, habits, and even photos. Why all this? Simple, because it is much easier to talk to a person, even if they only exist on paper, than to draw dialogues for the abstract.
• Build another persona to represent your virtual assistant: the principle and the reason for this process is identical to the previous paragraph. But here, only one persona counts. After all, you don't want to make a bipolar bot, right? ?
• Be clear about the usefulness of this bot: nowadays every bot needs to have a bit of Jerry Seinfield, that is, it needs to tell good jokes. It is what we call in the jargon chit-chat. But besides entertaining its consumer, the bot needs to make its purpose clear. If it is a bank bot, it needs to help the customer to find his balance, statement, etc... If it is a health bot, to prevent diseases, coronavirus, etc...

5. Design ?️

As for the peculiarities, it is worth paying attention to the new way of writing and speaking on the Internet:

• Genderless Texts: The New York City Commission on Human Rights has identified no less than 31 gender identities. You won't be the one to decide whether the person chatting with the bot will be male or female, right? Latin languages suffer more from sexism (there are many words in the feminine or masculine). In any speech, it is worth choosing genderless expressions.
• Spoken language: Experts say that in less than 10 years virtual assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant will become as ubiquitous devices in our daily lives as a television and refrigerator are today in the homes of the world. With this, spoken language will be mandatory.
• Emojis + gifs: The universe is becoming more informal, even in the more serious sectors, such as banking and even government. Emojis and gifs are the new “Esperanto” — everybody, from Brazil to Tokio can understand the same simbols— and this nice figures can immediately translate information, much better than a thousand words ?
• Short texts: ‘cause nobody has time for anything anymore. Put as much information in as few words and short paragraphs, preferably, with no more than 4 lines.