How to write winning dialogue for Conversational UI 💥

And what you can learn from novelists and screenwriters

Innovative companies face a new challenge: writing dialogue for Conversational UI.

(Pssst. check out www.conversationdesigninstitute.com This is where we now train and certify conversation designers.)

Now that chatbots are taking over, writing has captured its place at the heart of the product.

Dialogues help customers get from a to be faster. It helps them get jobs done, while at the same time building brand value and loyalty. 💥

But writing dialogue for chatbots is a tricky thing. It seems easy since most of us text and talk all day but writing a purpose driven dialogue is a different ballgame.

Every sentence has to drive the conversation forward and bring the user closer to his goal.

It requires the combined skills of a ux-writer and creative writer. Someone that takes a data driven approach and can be engaging at the same time.

What makes a great dialogue 🎉

In real life we chit-chat about all sorts of things. We discuss silly stuff around us and interrupt each other mid-sentence.

It’s no biggie… we’re used to it.

Most of the time, our conversations flow naturally. But with chatbots it’s different. It’s like real life messaging — but not just quite yet.

It’s where well written dialogue meets customer experience.

The famous sentence from the Godfather. A few scenes later Marlon Brando offers someone to grab a beer 🍻 while listening to Iron Maiden.

Novelists, playwrights and screenwriters are king 👑 at writing dialogues. In fact, they’re the only ones that ever had to string a few words together naturally.

They understand how to use dialogue to unfold a story and guide a hero on his journey. They use dialogue to show instead of tell.

How novelists, playwrights and screenwriters use dialogue 📚

In fiction and screenplays, dialogues tend to have three functions. Dialogues

1. Advance the story.
2. Tell us something about the location.
3. Tell us something about the characters.

Good writers make sure that each sentence has at least two of the above functions. So instead of just advancing the story, the sentence could also tell us something about the character or location at the same time.

Not only does this dialogue in Pulp Fiction advance the story, it also tells us something about the character Jules and his boss.

In these few simple sentences we learn that:

• Jules is a bad ass.
• His boss is even more bad ass.
• And people they were doing business with screwed them over. And now they are fucked.

Applying learnings to chatbot dialogue

If we take these three principles and apply them to chatbot writing, than we can say that dialogue for Conversational UI:

1. Advances the customer journey.
2. Understands context to provide a personalised experience.
3. Tells us something about the brand.

To make our dialogues useful and engaging at the same time, we should aim to serve multiple purposes when writing dialogue.

It generally means that we need a strong and recognisable character that

• is useful
• makes the brand come to life, and
• understands the customer’s context.

Let’s get to work. Here are a few simple guidelines that help you get on your way when writing dialogue for your new price winning chatbot.

Time to buckle up! 🚀

Preparations for writing dialogue for Conversational UI

Nobody just sits and writes. You need a game plan. A strategy.

Create a character driven identity

Who is your chatbot? It can be anyone that represents your business. Think of it as an extension of your brand.

Like writing a marketing persona, you need to clearly define your chatbot as a character. The character makes the bot come to life and helps customers understand who they interact with.

When you describe your character, you want to write a tone-of-voice document as well. You probably have this for your business, but the trick is to transform that and make it useful for the chatbot. After all, a chatbot talks different than an organisation.

What type of words does your character use and which would he never use? Is your character young and fun. Or a savvy lawyer. It all influences the way your character talks and interacts with customers.

Think of this way: characters in a Quintin Tarantino film talk different than those in a Pixar film.

When your character’s tone of voice is off, things just sort of seem to get weird…

Let’s be clear, your chatbot doesn’t need an avatar or really pretend to be a person. However, having a clear understanding of where the dialogues originate from helps in the writing process.

Define your goals

Each dialogue serves a purpose. Your customers have a certain job they want to get done and your dialogue should help them get there faster.

It’s a method to help your customers get from start to finish. Before you do anything else, you need to understand your customer and know which problem you’re solving.

Like CX Company understands, customers generally want

• a question answered
• a problem solved
• or to make a purchase

Sketch a flowchart for your dialogue

You’re getting closer to actually writing. However, before you write a single word of dialogue you need a flowchart of the dialogue.

No need to get fancy. Paper and pencil will do the trick.

The flowchart gives you an overview of all directions your conversations can go. Every message can be answered in more than one way and all scenarios need to be covered.

Pick a scenario

Once you have the chart figured out, there’s another step that most writers skip. Even though multiple scenarios are part of the same chart, each scenario is a conversation on its own — and should be treated as such.

So when you write the dialogue for one path within your chart, don’t even think about the other ways the conversations could have gone. Each customer only has one conversation. And on his journey he has nothing to do with someone else’s journey.

Your flowchart contains multiple scenarios. But each user only experiences one scenario. It's important to remember this when writing dialogue.

Writing dialogue for Conversational UI

You’ve done your preparations, it’s time to get creative. Let’s write a cool and engaging dialogue that helps your customers. The analytical part of your brain can take a rest, it’s time to bring out the poet.

Here’s some general tips and tricks for writing in a style that makes your bot come to life.

• speak in your brand’s voice
• always speak one-on-one
• keep it short
• keep advice step-driven
• don’t skip character reaction
• don’t go overboard wth humor
• admit defeat gracefully

After writing dialogue for Conversational UI 🔭

Almost there. Just not quite done yet.

Before you hit the publish button and call it a day, there’s a few more things we need to do to get it right. Writing dialogue for Conversational UI isn’t that easy.

• Read your dialogue out loud and everything that sounds like it’s written needs to be rewritten. We learned that from Elmore Leonard.
• Analyse journeys and interactions. Crunch those numbers. Analyse drop-offs figure out what you can improve.
• Always run experiments. AB-test your way to success. If you find that a dialogue isn’t delivering desired results, don’t just mix it up but run a test so you can be certain you’re improving.
• Keep tweaking. The work is never done. Keep testing. Keep making it better. Always take a data driven approach and don’t be afraid to fail and learn. It can always get better.

Final thoughts on writing dialogue for Conversational UI 👯‍

Here you have it: a few tips on how to write better dialogue for Conversational UI. Take these guidelines and your chatbot should come to life and deliver some real value — to both you and your customers.

Psst. Go to www.conversationdesigninstitute.com and become a conversation designer. The courses are co-created with some of the largest tech companies in the world. It’s the only way to become a certified conversation designer.

Please 👏 if you enjoyed this.

Originally published at hvdam.com.