Chatbot Design

Design the chatbot to help the prospective students seeking information.

Project Overview

The project is a UX Practicum at the University of Washington, we finished the chatbot project partnered with the Foster School of Business. We focused on the MSCM and MSBA programs' admissions departments to automate the process of guiding prospective students through application information, thereby reducing administrative tasks for admissions officers.

Problem Statement

The problem arises during admission season when hundreds of prospective students worldwide visit the Foster School of Business website seeking information about its graduate programs.

These students often have urgent questions about admission requirements, deadlines, and other details that are crucial for their applications. Unfortunately, the information they need is dispersed across multiple webpages and program sections, making it a time-consuming challenge to find specific answers.

Design Goals

  • 01 Reduce our assistant program directors' daily email burden.
  • 02 Enhance user engagement with the MSBA&MSCM program
  • 03 Elevate the look & feel of the Programs to be more innovative.

HMW

How might we efficiently answers questions from prospective students considering applying to the programs at the Foster School of Business?

View the Chatbot

Information

Type
Chatbot Design
Platform
Website
My Roles
Designer& Researcher
Design Methods
User Surveys | Use Case Definition | Competitive Analysis | Information Architecture | Usability Testing | Script Writing

Design process

01

Understanding

Interviews with our clients, the admission offices, understanding their pain points and gathering initial data about the project.

02

Competitive Analysis

Surveying chatbot services and evaluating their effectiveness based on our client's needs.

03

User Research

Understanding our users, who they are, what are some common questions they ask.

04

Design & Content

Interviews with our clients, the admission offices, understanding their pain points and gathering initial data about the project.

05

Usability Test

Usability testing with prospective student with the chatbot demo and assess whether their questions have been answered.

06

Future Plan

Revise the conversation design, user flow and addressing edge cases.Provide clear documentation and instructions.

Research Process

01 Design Regulations

  • Identify Key Needs of the Target Audience(prospective students) before start to design
  • Users need a Conversational interface beyond dialogue but may not Want to 'Chat'
  • Decide early whether the chatbot will have a human-like persona or a clear machine identity.
  • Users should always feel in control of the interaction.
  • Acknowledge the current limitations of AI and use UI elements to fill these gaps, fostering human-machine collaboration.

02 Understanding & Identify

Context of Use

The primary users are prospective graduate students who are likely to access the chatbot through the school's website.the students are seeking specific information about graduate programs, such as admission requirements, deadlines, tuition fees, course details, and more. They expect quick, accurate responses to aid their decision-making process for application.

  • The users are Time-Sensitivity and need to think about technique support.
  • Cultural and Linguistic Factors.
  • Since the special needs and time period, thw chatbot should provide a supportive, reassuring user experience, minimizing anxiety and confusion.
  • Users might interact with the chatbot multiple times throughout their application process, requiring the chatbot to offer consistent and reliable information with each interaction.

Stakeholders' Needs

  • The administration office requires a chatbot that automates routine inquiries for efficiency, provides accurate program information to minimize confusion, and gathers user interaction data for continuous improvement. It must be reliable and scalable, especially during peak admissions periods, to maintain consistent performance.
  • Prospective students need a chatbot that quickly delivers precise program details, admission requirements, and deadlines. The chatbot should offer personalized responses, multilingual support for international students, and an accessible, user-friendly interface on various devices, ensuring a supportive and stress-free interaction experience.

03 Survey

Key Findings

  • 60% of users prefer selecting questions from a menu than typing in questions directly.
  • Information that users frequently have trouble finding on the website include: Opportunities After Graduation, Student Experiences and Faculty & Staff, etc.
  • Users want more distinct personality for the chatbot.

04 Secondary Research

Sources:

  • Foster school of businesswebsite Google Analytics data.
  • Email History and FAQs from faculty.
  • Prospective MSCM&MSBA research and survey conducted by UW instructor.

Key Findings:

  • Pages related to Admission and Degree Requirements are most viewed by users.
  • 48% of users are international students.
  • Most FAQs are related to Admission and Degree Requirements. Among Admission questions, international students are concerned about questions related to STEM and visa eligibility.

Who are visiting the site?

Our researchers dived into Google Analytics and interviewed our assistant director to pinpoint different personas and their frequently asked questions.

Key Metrics

USERS

37589

BOUNCE RATE

54.74%

APPOINTMENTS

116

05 Personas

06 Competitive Research

What are the criteria?

Why Tidio?

Design Process

01 Competitive Research

The Rule of Thumb
Tone & Language
Readability
Common Responses
The Rule of Thumb
  • Keep it concise.
  • Front-load the important information.
  • Avoid jargon and acronyms.
  • Use bullets and numbered lists to prevent visual clutter. (No more than 10 items)
  • Use short sentences and paragraphs.
  • The ideal standard is <20 words per sentence, 5 sentences per paragraph.
  • < 200 characters
  • Use dashes instead of semicolons
  • Break a long sentence into two.
  • Ok to start a sentence with “and,” “but,” or “or” if it makes things clear and brief.
  • Use images, diagrams, or multimedia to visually represent ideas in the content.
  • Use a conversational, informative, and friendly tone in all interactions.
  • Keep it casual but avoid using slang.
  • Use the active voice. “Request information now”
  • Use second-person voice (“you” and “we”) in order to speak directly to the user.
  • Use short sentences and paragraphs.
  • Introduce the chatbot as a helpful resource for prospective students and website visitors.
  • Start each conversation with a polite greeting.
  • Write descriptive, meaningful, and relevant headers and subheaders for your content.
  • Use bolding to draw attention to important information – but don't overuse it
  • No underlining for emphasis. The underlined text reads as a hyperlink, which can lead to confusion.
  • Avoid using all caps.
  • Aim to score the 6th grader for readability (Hemingway App)
  • Prepare responses for FAQs related to programs and admissions.
  • Offer short-form, accurate information to address inquiries effectively.
  • Give options to learn more. (URL, video, etc)
  • Ask for feedback on the chatbot experience (survey, like/dislike, a short answer for option)

02 Information Architecture

03 Backend logic lines

04 Usability Test

Participants Recruiting

Advantages:

  • Easy to recruit
  • Willing to share

Limitations:

  • Not prospective student
  • Familiar with information

Introduction

Hi, ___________. My name is ___________, and I am the designer of the Foster Chatbot project. As you might already know, we’re asking people to try using this new tool to see if it works as intended. Our Team wants to let you know that we are testing the chatbot, not you. So please feel free to say anything about it. We’re doing this to improve the chatbot, so we need to hear your honest reactions. You might also know that this chatbot is mainly for prospective students. We know that you are the ambassador for the MSBA/MSCM. So we are inviting you to pretend to be a prospective student as you were several months ago. In that sense, you may want to do some role-play. The session should take about 20 minutes. As you use the chatbot, I’m going to ask you as much as possible to try to think out loud: to say what you’re looking at, what you’re trying to do, and what you’re thinking. If you have any questions along the way, feel free to ask me. I may not be able to answer them right away since we’re interested in seeing how people use it. But if you still have any questions when we’re done, I’ll try to answer them. With your permission, we’re going to record what happens on the screen and our conversation. The recording will only be used to help us figure out how to improve the site, and it won’t be seen by anyone except the people working on this project. Do you have any questions before we start?

Part 01- Initial Questions

  • Could you tell me something about your current position? (like your job, what is your daily routine)
  • Are you an international/domestic student?
  • Why are you interested in business school master programs? Have you started searching for them?
  • Have you read the information for MSBA/MSCM on their official website?

Supervised Task: Ease of Use and Chatbot Pages

Goal Tracking Criteria
1. Time to finish [Sec]
2. Success Ratio [ ratio of successful/unsuccessful participants]
3. Comprehension [Correct explanation of expected outcome]
  • Admissions:
    Imagine you are applying and through the website you want to get some info( 4 questions)
  • Tuition/Funding–program time period:
    You are comparing whether the two programs are affordable and which one is cheaper.( 2 questions)
  • Job opportunities, CPT/OPT:
    Then let’s move on to the job opportunities and immigration policy part. ( As an International student)
  • Second, you also want to find out how many months you will spend in the program.

Unsupervised Task: Ease of Use and Product Pages

Just now we defined the goal for you. Now would you try to play around with your own ideas?
  • What are other things you would like to search for?
  • How our program is different from other programs?
  • What’s special about Foster?

Overall Evaluation

Thank you for your sharing!
Before we stop, I would like to invite you to evaluate the Chatbot as a whole.
Did the Chatbot help at all? 1-5 rating, 1 means very unhelpful, 5 means very helpful

Participants Ratings

Insights

Design Solutions

The FAQ feature streamlines the search process by allowing students to select relevant tabs.
The chat function allows users type in their specific questions and get answers in real-time.

Next steps

01 Future Plan

  • Conduct more usability testing with prospective students to gather feedback and improve user experience
  • Implement basic navigational changes such as "Anything else?" option and the ability to return to the main menu
  • Expand chatbot categories to include more specific information such as upcoming events, fee breakdowns, and department-wise contact details
  • Add live agents to the chatbot for real-time assistance
  • Develop the chatbot to allow students and faculty to tailor the content and make it more relevant and accurate

02 Learnings

  • Conducting stakeholder interviews to gather insights helped ensure that the chatbot aligned with their needs.
  • Prioritizing user needs and keeping them at the center of the design process was crucial
  • Choosing an existing chatbot platform saved time and provided easy backend access for non-technical stakeholders
  • Booking demo sessions to evaluate and compare features, functionality, and ease of use was beneficial
  • Testing and iterating on the chatbot with real users ensured it met their needs and solved their pain points
  • Incorporating natural language processing enhanced usability
  • Providing 24/7 chatbot service improved user experience and reduced the workload of program advisers