The hurdles that conversation designers and developers face: client team alignment & how a conversational bot can fulfil their needs

Conversations with Hans van Dam

The two main challenges facing conversation designers are client team alignment and ensuring that clients have a good understanding of how a conversational bot will fulfil their needs.

To ensure success, a conversation designer needs to get client team members on the same page, so that there’s a shared understanding of what a bot can achieve. Client teams also need regular progress reports so that they can give frequent feedback. Actually, accomplishing these things is much harder than it sounds.

One way to resolve these challenges is to actually build a bot, but is rarely a viable solution. A client probably won’t want to pay for engineering work if they are not ready to make a decision to proceed with the work

In this episode of the Conversation Design Institute podcast, host Hans van Dam talks to Obaid Ahmed about some of the hurdles conversational designers and developers face, and now Obaid founded Botmock to solve many of these hurdles.

Botmock is a platform that allows for the rapid creation of prototypes and design conversational experiences across multiple channels – both voice and text.

A conversation designer and entrepreneur, Obaid came up with the idea for Botmock while he was working for a design agency and developing Facebook bots for clients. He and his team kept hitting a roadblock - difficulty in giving clients a strong sense of what a good conversation on Facebook Messenger would look and feel like.

“One of our team members thought: ‘Maybe we can handle this better’,” recalls Obaid. “We created a simple script that would take input from Excel and other places and convert it into a dynamic chat.”

Botmock was born.

Obaid outlines the kinds of people involved in a project, such as a writer, developer, and a data scientist, noting that as soon as you have more that one person involved in a conversation design project, you need a system to map and keep everyone on the same page.

You can find Obaid Ahmed on LinkedIn, and Botmock at Botmock.com.