Designing Bots

From Facebook Messenger to Kik, and from Slack bots to Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and email bots, the new conversational apps are revolutionizing the way we interact with software. This practical guide shows you how to design and build great conversational experiences and delightful bots that help people be more productive, whether it’s for a new consumer service or an enterprise efficiency product.

Ideal for designers, product managers, and entrepreneurs, this book explores what works and what doesn’t in real-world bot examples, and provides practical design patterns for your bot-building toolbox. You’ll learn how to use an effective onboarding process, outline different flows, define a bot personality, and choose the right balance of rich control and text.

• Explore different bot use-cases and design best practices
• Understand bot anatomy—such as brand and personality, conversations, advanced UI controls—and their associated design patterns
• Learn steps for building a Facebook Messenger consumer bot and a Slack business bot
• Explore the lessons learned and shared experiences of designers and entrepreneurs who have built bots
• Design and prototype your first bot, and experiment with user feedback

Who Should Read This Book?

Designers

This book will be your toolkit for designing bots, a book you can go back to when tackling your own bot design. We will go into the details of the design process, and give concrete examples of designing bots for B2B and B2C use cases. We will go over everything from use case specification to actual designing of a bot, all the way to validating our design with users.

Product Managers

This book will arm you with a good understanding of which use cases are better suited for bots and how you, as a product manager, can use bots to expose and extend your products. We will provide examples of how to write the specification for a good conversational interface, and share best practices on product decisions that have led to user delight.

Entrepreneurs

This book will give you an overview of the bot ecosystem, the opportunities that it offers to you, the engagement and monetization models this interface facilitates, and the competitive advantage it has over web and mobile. This book is also full of tips from fellow entrepreneurs, sharing their experiences while building a bot business.

About the Author

Amir Shevat is a VP of developer experience at Twitch. He has spent the past 15 years building developer products, APIs, and ecosystems around APIs at Slack, Microsoft, and Google. He is also the author of Designing Bots (O’Reilly).