UX Guidelines 

For Designing Chatbots

• Be upfront about using a bot and not a human.

• Clearly tell people what tasks the bot can do. Make sure you don’t create false expectations.

• Don’t be overly ambitious: create bots for simple tasks. Complexity is not well handled in the limited bot interface.

• Tolerate typos and ambiguity.

• Allow people to interact with the bot both through free-text input and selection of links.

• Allow sorting and filtering to let people narrow down through results.

• Save information from one task to the next.

• Program some flexibility into the bot: infer context and allow people to jump forward and backward in the linear flow.

• Be honest about not understanding. Offer an escape hatch in the form of a real human, a phone number, or a link to a different interaction channel.