Chatbot Glossary
Intro
We use various terms throughout the CxD Guidelines. Some are similar to the conversational design industry terminology. But some might be a bit different. Here’s a good reference of these Conversational Design concepts and their definitions.
Chatbot Personality
The chatbot personality defines how it interacts with users and ensures a consistent user experience with your dialog. It makes the digital assistant more likeable and trustworthy, and incorporates your company brand and style. See the CxD Personality Framework for examples.
Chatbot Persona
The fictional character the digital assistant uses when it interacts with users. Digital assistants have characteristics, including language and tone, to give users the best experience possible. The digital assistant persona is not the same as a (human) user persona that defines your users. The persona includes context, identity, chatting style, and standard vocabulary and phrases. It also includes the bot’s name, avatar, and personality.
Components
User Interface components (also called UI elements) are used in conversational design and by SAP Fiori. The components range from simple to complex controls designed for a a more consistent and accessible experience.
Design Thinking
An iterative, creative, and collaborative approach to solving problems. The user-centric methodology relies on empathy to understand user needs that results in innovative solutions that meet user needs. See Design Process Overview and Design Thinking in a Nutshell.
Dialog Model
The CxD Dialog Model follows a path that applies to all your conversational design use cases to seamlessly integrate into your user interface and identify prompts and user requests.
Digital Assistant
A method of having 24/7 conversations between a business user and an enterprise system using text or voice. Enables business users to chat or speak with an enterprise digital assistant to complete their tasks and shorten their business processes and workflows.
Empathy
The level a chatbot/voicebot can react in an empathic manner without wrongly guessing the user’s emotions. Empathy shows understanding of the user’s situation. It is important to never guess or assume how the user is feeling and to never create conflict.
Enterprise Digital Assistant
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.
Expectations
Also called Expectation Settings. Providing the user with information about what the chatbot/voicebot can do. This includes only the main functions and there should be no more than 5 for a chatbot or 3 for a voice bot. It’s also fine to provide a “something else” option. Setting expectations usually takes place in the bot introduction.
Happy Path
The Happy Path is the most popular and most likely scenarios users will experience. Statistics show that 80% of users follow 20% of conversational paths (Pareto principle). Do user research to make sure that your chatbot/voicebot matches the expectations of your users.
Multi-Modality
Multi-modal interaction types let users switch between interaction methods, so that they have simple, natural conversations, and can freely interact with the digital assistant using voice, text, or gestures. Learn how to Design for Multimodality.
Onboarding
During onboarding, the digital assistant introduces itself to the user. There should be a couple of different versions so that returning users don’t get bored with the same intro every time. The intro should also include a short list of the main functions of the bot to set the expectations of the user and get them down the right conversational path.
Prompt
Dialog that explicitly asks the user for input. For example, including a question at the end of every chatbot/voicebot statement. This ensures the user knows it is their turn to talk. The chatbot/voicebot can respond “Sure, I can book a table for you.” and prompt immediately after with “When is it for?” See CxD Dialog Model for more information on creating dialog.
SAP Conversational AI Platform
The SAP digital assistant-building platform lets you manage business tasks by deploying powerful conversational AI interfaces. Learn more about SAP Conversational AI on the SAP Help Portal. Visit SAP Conversational AI tools.
SAP Conversational User Experience Design (SAP CxD)
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.
User Persona
The user persona is where you define the users of your digital assistant. Who are they, what is their role, job responsibilities, main goals, needs, pain points? Defining your users helps create a use case before you design your digital assistant. How, when, and where the user interacts with your bot is so that you can properly form the digital assistant personality, tone, and purpose.
Wizard of Oz Testing
A process that lets users interact with the digital assistant interface without knowing that a human, the “Wizard”, is generating the responses, rather than a computer. This process lets you test user reactions to your digital assistant before you start developing it.