What useful Slack bots do we have?

Jul 13, 2016 · 5 min read

Image from Alex Garland’s movie ‘*Ex Machina’*

There are a lot of bots around us. A majority of the bot makers focused on conversational UI (Jarvis-style-UI) in which you ask a bot and get an answer. While they were busy playing with natural query recognition, they lost the main thing — the problem the bots were solving.

The most popular use case with bots is greeting, asking, getting an answer that the question wasn’t recognized, and stopping using the bot.

At ConcertWith.me team, we were also skeptical about bots. But we love useful notifications from some apps inside our Slack team chat. We’ve integrated some useful tools:

NewRelic (to know about server problems),
Sentry (to learn about front-end issues),
Stripe (for celebrating every new sale),
Harvest+Asana (to know what each teammate is doing right now),
GitHub (project updates),
Pipedrive (new deals, unfinished orders, etc.)

However, no bot became our teammate. But we’ve tried a lot. I’ve asked our friends about how they were using Slack and what useful integrations they found. They named the same apps that we use and some others (AppFollow for app reviews, Mentions for brand mentions on the web, Trello, Asana, etc.), but nobody recommended a bot, just because bots are too silly yet.

Plug-n-play integration

Why did “old” notifications become much more useful than modern bots? I believe there are two main reasons:

Text UI sucks (now).
People hate setting up new softwhare while onboarding.
Awkward UI + Settings = fail

All integrations I’ve mentioned earlier, don’t need setting up. They have a plug-n-play approach; you just need to connect it to your chat and you start getting useful alerts. That’s why notifications are much better then bots.

Need or trend?

I’ve been thinking for a long time, were any of the bot makers building their own bots to solve some problem, or were they just following the mainstream trend? Were they dogfooding?

From great post ‘Chat-Bots vs. Google Search’

I’m not sure. I don’t believe that somebody was struggling without the ability to order pizza via Slack chat or that it’s easier to find out the weather by typing a question and then looking at Mac’s sidebar :)

As the Jobs-to-be-done manifesto says: “Great products start with real problems.”

How good Slack bot colleague looks like

The tech industry loves to repeat mantras like “Bots are the New Apps” or “Forget Apps, Now The Bots Take Over”. Let’s try to think about a good product in the chat dimension. What are the properties of useful bot that we would be happy to use, how should it look like?

Of course, it should start from the problem. What problem should we hire a bot to solve for us?
Good UI: How to interact with a bot? How to set up it properly? How should user immediately memorized all these “here is what I can do for you commands” at the first launch of the brand new Slack bot? I like Birdly’s approach on Slack bot, and the fact that you don’t need to dig into settings, learn new commands, etc.
Just use the common ‘upload a photo’ button and it will recognize your expense receipt. You can argue that bots were built to talk to it. But all this “natural language request” fails too often. It’s better to have a sense of available options about what to do next. That’s why Slack created buttons.
Good UI starts with a perfect onboarding process. The bot have to explain to the user how to achieve goals and it has just one attempt to do that. I’ve talked to my friends who’ve built bots. They declared a churn rate of 50% to 90% after the first launch. It correlates with the quality of the first bot’s reply. So our first query must be successful. It must be obvious how it works. It must contain familiar objects for user. The User should have a clear sense of what we can do and what we can’t.
Drive the value with each interaction: the value must be clear and obvious. It could be time and/or money saving by getting important messages/warnings at the right moment. (That’s why instant messaging exists). How a user achieves his personal goal. User should understand how it’s great not to switch between apps and get instant help inside Slack. Like in a Hooked model user has a reward for each interaction. Look at NewRellic’s notifications: each time we got ’em, we thanked NewRelic for predicting some accident to happen to our server.
If the bot disturbs user, it must be for something that is really valuable and important. Otherwise, it will be muted or removed. Bot’s channel shouldn’t be too noisy or too silent. Uhh, this old notification dilemma. How not to spam a user? How not to miss something important? How not to be forgotten? Look at AppFlow’s notifications; they send each App review from the App Store to your channel. I love to read each one of them. If we have a lot of reviews, I won’t be pissed off if we have a lot of app reviews :)