How do I become a conversation designer?

Conversation design is a career on the rise! And I sure notice that in my inbox: I get a lot of questions on how to break into this great profession. As much as I’d love to answer all of your messages personally, there’s only so many hours in a day. So instead, I collected some of the most frequently asked questions and put them here for you.

What is a conversation designer?

Simply put: a conversation designer creates the conversations that you and I have with chatbots and voice assistants. We call these bots conversational interfaces, because you can talk to them in your very own words. That makes them extremely easy to use.

Chatbots on websites, Facebook or Whatsapp are examples of text-driven conversational interfaces: you type your question, and the answer appears in one or more text bubbles. But I also design for voice assistants, like Google assistant on your phone or Google home, Siri, Alexa or Bixby.

A relatively new and fast-rising type of conversational interface is the conversational landing page, which replaces the traditional website home page with a chat interface.

What does a conversation designer do?

From my own experience, I can tell you that my activities are very diverse. And they depend a lot on the type of bot that I build, the topic at hand and the organisation that I work for. Hey, that’s why I love my job :-)

I usually start by finding the problem that we want to solve or the value that we want to add with a conversational interface. Because building a bot, just because you want a bot: that’s not going to work. So before I start designing anything, I go and explore the organisation to discover their stakeholders and customer journey. I interview, observe and above all: I listen.

When we’ve decided which use cases are going to be part of our bot, I design flows. These are the conversational paths through a bot. We humans are experts in conversation, and as such, have high expectations from bots too. This means that my flows shouldn’t just contain correct information; they should be pleasant, natural and helpful too.

Delightful and consistent bot behaviour is just as important. What should a bot do when it doesn’t know the answer? Which behaviour and character traits make my bot effective and agreeable? Which tone of voice does best suit my audience’s need? All this and more, I record in a bot persona, a style guide, design patterns and terminology lists.

And… testing, testing, testing. Once your bot is live, the real work begins. Because only then, you really know what your customers are asking. And which answers your bot can’t give yet. Which topics may need extra training.

Where do conversation designers work?

You can find us anywhere really. Now that chatbots are becoming a more serious part of company’s omni channel strategy, there’s a rising demand for people who know how to design them. More companies realise that conversation design is a real profession, and that a good conversation designer can save them many hours of rework.

How do I find a job as a conversation designer?

Despite the rising popularity of conversation interfaces, you won’t find that many job vacancies that actually ask for a conversation designer. That’s mainly because most companies do not realise yet that our profession has a name.

So if you’re looking for conversation designer jobs, make sure that you include related terms like ‘chatbot builder’, ‘content specialist’, ‘UX writer’, ‘customer journey expert’, ‘writer for chatbots’ and ‘copywriter’.

Also, realise that many jobs, at least here in the Netherlands, become available through informal networks. The conversational space is relatively small, so it’s not that difficult to get to know many people on a personal level. Communities such as Women in Voice and #voicelunch are great for meeting conversational colleagues and possible employers!

What skills do conversation designers need?

Even though conversation design itself might be a relatively young discipline, it’s a combination of skills that have been around for much longer. Here are a few to get you started.

Curiosity. About everything. About how chatbots work. About the domain that your bot will cover. About how language and conversation work. About processes. Data. And most of all: about people. You’re creating bots to be used. So get to know your user, their needs, their motives, their pain points beyond just user personas and journeys.

Writing. No, not really, more like talking. Or writing like how you talk. Your bots, even those that use text input, are about speech, not written text. You’re creating dialogue, not content. This medium has its own style, conventions and patterns. No sentences and paragraphs, but turns and sequences. No documents, but conversations. Breath. Melody.

Explaining. Considering that most people use a bot to get their questions answered, or their problems solved, it’s very handy to have some knowledge about instruction design, cognitive load and mental models. Instructional design and technical communication are well-established disciplines that offer decades of expertise on these topics.

Solving puzzles, analysing and structuring. Unless you want to limit yourself to conversational copywriting, there’s no escape: you will be building bots to some extent. On platforms that are, most likely, not going to be very intuitive. Do flowcharts, sudoku and logical quizzes make your heart beat faster? Then welcome, you have found your dream job. Some stamina required.

Do I need to know how to code?

No. Most platforms offer some kind of no-code design interface. However…logical thinking skills and a structured way of working are a must, in my eyes. Bots require a fair amount of content logic and structure (think re-use, variables, conditional flows). And any kind of non-linear writing activity (like flows and dialogs) means that you need to keep an overview, especially when your bot becomes more complex.

Mind you, after spending a while in bot land, you might have seen so much code around that you might get interested in it! :-) And that’s of course a big plus: being able to understand code makes it so much easier to talk with the tech people on your team. And they will love you for making the effort.

engati.com — My favorite platform for sketching out my own bots. It’s free, extremely easy to use, and it has a beautiful web widget that you can tweak to your own liking.
landbot.io — Free, easy and fun. Very suitable for clicking together a button bot or a conversational landing page.
dialogflow.com — For building voice actions on Google Assistant.
voiceflow.com — The pinnacle of user friendliness when it comes to building voice actions & skills for both Google Assistant and Alexa. Love it.