Coming from a mixed background of mechanical engineering and UX research and design, I sometimes feel it is hard to tell my story efficiently on a website. Visitors of my website know what I am capable of, but they do not know the reason behind the mixed background. I want to develop this chatbot and put it on my website so that visitors can get to know my story like they are talking directly to me.
I started out by defining the characteristics of the bot. Since I want it to give the visitor a feeling of talking directly to me, I set the tones and the persona to be myself. The bot's talking style will be my talking style, and the image of the bot will be my personal logo, which was designed to resemble my face.
Using the tones and the information I want to share with the bot, I started designing the flowchart. I started by laying out all the contents I want to say through the bot and organized them into categories.
The dialog flow is designed based on one goal, which is to lead the visitors, ultimately, to view my projects, so the conversation is designed to loop back to one of two questions: "What else do you want to know about me" and "Do you want to see some of my work?"
I used Google Dialogflow to build my chatbot since it can be easily implemented on my website through several lines of HTML code.
The current testing model can be found on my portfolio website: tcyang.com/chatbottest.html
Doing the project helped me understand much more about conversational design and building a web app. Figuring out what context a conversation is in and setting up the context for future interactions are really crucial towards smooth conversations.
Currently, the chatbot is implemented through an API by DialogFlow on my website. If I had more time, I wish to get rid of the DialogFlow box and allow my visitors to be greeted with the conversation, instead of an embedded function. I am planning to make the chatbot working during the summer.
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