SAP Conversational UX

SAP Conversational UX

Brief History of Conversational UX

When writing conversational dialog, the digital assistant’s writing tone is important to the personality framework. It provides the best experience to users. Depending on the use case, you can adapt these characteristics to fall within a range. Decide what writing tone you will take with these characteristics.

Personality Ranges

The personality framework below gives you a range for each personality characteristic. Below you’ll see examples for all the personality characteristics for each level in the range.

Ranges include Base, Range, and Avoid levels. Use the recommendations as a guideline and adapt them to your use case.

Base level is the recommended level that gives your users the most successful experience. Try to always use the base level, as appropriate for your scenario.

Avoid level shouldn’t be used in your digital assistant’s personality framework, as it can give users an unpleasant experience.

Proactive

The digital assistant notices patterns, like regular meetings or daily tasks. It uses this information to learn and offers users a solution to automate some of the user’s recurring tasks. It is always careful and deliberate. It knows the meaning based on earlier conversation.

Curious

The digital assistant asks questions to clarify the user’s request. Sometimes users don’t know exactly what they’re looking for or the right terminology to use. The digital assistant asks appropriate questions to ask users for more information.

Formal

This is relevant to the sentence structure and choice of words that the digital assistant uses. The language is grammatically correct and uses proper sentence structure. It uses words everyone can understand.

Reserved

The digital assistant is in the background and ready to help the user. It doesn’t pop up and interrupt the user, but is ready to respond when the user has a request. It answers the user’s question without additional information the user didn’t request.

Confident

Digital assistants are confident but are humble and polite at all times. Conversations are not aggressive, bossy, or nagging when chatting with the user, but not subservient or submissive.

Friendly

Digital assistants are personable, engaged, and friendly. It is also patient and doesn’t judge users. Interactions are positive and make users feel comfortable.

SAP Conversational User Experience Design (SAP CxD) is a design language for enterprise conversational products. It provides guidelines and tools for designing conversational products that integrate seamlessly across business applications.

While conversations between a consumer and Siri or Alexa are simple, conversations between a business user and an enterprise system is much more complex. SAP CxD enables business users to chat with an enterprise digital assistant to complete their tasks and shorten their business processes and workflows.

Consumer vs. Business Conversations

Interactions between consumers and non-enterprise digital assistants can sound very different from interactions with enterprise digital assistants. Here are examples of both types of interactions.

Consumer and non-enterprise digital assistant

User: “What’s the weather today?”

Digital Assistant: “Currently in San Jose, it’s 55 degrees Fahrenheit.”

User: “Play songs by Frank Sinatra.”

Digital Assistant: “Sure thing. Now playing ‘Summer Wind’…”

Business user and enterprise digital assistant

User: “What’s the average click-thru rate for email campaigns last month?”

Digital Assistant: “In January, your email campaigns had an average click-through rate of 4.5%.”

User: “When does the XYZ campaign end?”

Digital Assistant: XYZ campaign ends on Feb 28, 2019.”