Content Writing for Your Bot

Bonus part 5 of Designing Conversational UI with Information Architecture

Welcome to a bonus part 5 of my series on IA and Conversational UI! I was asked about content writing, and although I no longer drive that portion of my work, I did work in communications so I was happy to write a bit about this.

There’s an increasing amount of overlap between graphical user interfaces (GUI) and voice user interfaces (VUI), which necessitates a new skillset: user experience professionals with deep understanding of narrative design and conversational design. -Kristina Bjoran, UX Booth

One of the more interesting aspects of content writing for chatbots is the need to move beyond writing for persuasion. Marketing and communications (and some technical writing) is traditionally about conveying a brand voice and ideally soft-selling a product or service. While chatbots can hold this function, content writing for conversational UI should be more akin to UX writing.

Yes, another UX role.

Let’s not fall into the trap of defining yet another role for us poor creatives to take on. Let’s just think about this in a more traditional design sense.

UX writing and IA is about placemaking, sensemaking and wayfinding.

For the last 4 parts of the series, I talked about sensemaking and a bit about wayfinding. But I didn’t talk much about placemaking.

Placemaking is not Spacemaking

I have something to confess. I never write about placemaking in IA because I end up in a weird loop. In order to define placemaking, you must define place. But ultimately placemaking is about defining places! Words are hard.

So here is my attempt at a brief description of placemaking and how it is applicable in the digital realm.

In (non-information) architecture, we define places literally. But we do this by creating things and spaces that people already understand. Think of them as design patterns.

In the front of my building is an 8 ft tall piece of wood with a glass pane inserted at above eye-level and a piece of round metal protruding from it.

David Howard (CC BY 2.0)

It’s a door! Doors have been around for a long time and although they take many shapes and forms, people almost automatically know what to do with them. They are the entrances and exits to other spaces.

But what happens when a door no longer looks or acts like a door?

This reminds me I need to rewatch Jaques Tati’s Playtime

In an information environment, we make places in a similar manner. People have come to expect certain consistencies in the words and information that we architect. And when our content suddenly shifts from being a more traditional-looking door to a glass pane, we create problems.

Placemaking ultimately leads to sensemaking and wayfinding.

Identifying what place you are architecting

Your content will need to have a purpose. And that narrative voice, that content strategy, needs to come from a bot’s purpose. So let’s try defining that first.

From Jorge Arango’s must read: “3 Placemaking Lessons From the Magic Kingdom”

You can fill in the sentence above to get you started. Here you ask for movie recommendations based on previously-defined preferences. This is fine, but rather product-y. Think grander. Here you come to open up your world and discover new movies.

Remember: You are writing about the place you are making, not the brand or the product. And you are doing it from the point of view of your user, not your bot.

What about the content?

Great! Now you have a statement that aligns your designers, engineers, marketers and writers. What now?

You’ll need to define a few other traits before you can jump into the writing. Some of these traits may come from an existing brand or editorial guide. But some of them you will need to define on your own.

1. What is the bot’s personality? Is it jovial? Does it make jokes? Is it a serious bot? What is appropriate for a custom t-shirt maker is different than what is appropriate for a healthcare provider.
2. What is the content’s style? We all know to avoid passive voice when writing. But when you’re crafting conversations, you may want to include some more passive sentences (see what I did there?). It just feels more natural.
3. What are the plain-language equivalents of industry jargon? This doesn’t always come out as a step in content writing, but as someone who comes from some rather difficult-to-communicate fields, I always take the time to do this.

Now go write a first draft. Outline a back and forth conversation as you understand it.

Testing your content

Testing conversations has not changed much in years. I was listening to a colleague tell me about a test they ran some 15 years ago for a large telecom giant. They were testing the voice prompts for the phone system and had people sit around a large conference room with scripts and acted out each prompt.

We can now make and deploy chatbots pretty easily. It’s such a low barrier with chatbots that I recommend deploying content in beta and iterating from there. As someone who is constantly (constantly) refining and editing my writing, I can attest that having real users give me feedback and data has been invaluable to the process.

So yeah. I didn’t exactly give you a step-by-step guide to writing content. I scoured medium and realized that there are those who have already written much better articles about the subject. So I will point you to them instead.

Additional Reading:

Making Chatbots Talk — Writing Conversational UI Scripts Step by Step

Design words with data

Tech Writing Handbook - Dozuki