Outcome

Who is Walker?

Walker is an SMS chatbot to help you find jobs and skills related to one. He is your job helper to provide as many jobs as possible for you even though you have never heard the job titles before.

Why Walker?

Jobs are complex in the labor market. Different organizations may have different names for one position. For example, product manager, product owner and project manager. Their names are different but they actually require similar skills. As a job hunter, you may miss some jobs only because you don't know the names. 

Process

I started the chatbot with building its personality as for the attitude, value, habit and so on. Then I mapped out the conversation flow to check the interactions between the app and the users. I did several testings with users and got feedback. Then I iterated the conversation. I built the basic structure of the chatbot by Ruby, Heroku and Twillio. I also explored the possible APIs to integrate them into the project. Before I implemented it by coding, I created a function matrix to prioritize the features. In the end, I coded for all of the features.

Meet Walker

Product

Here is the main feature list of my bot - Walker:

1. Sign up and say hi

Users need to sign up with their name and phone number before they start the service. They are supposed to get a secret code before they can sign up. After signing up, it will automatically send a start message to guide the users on how to use the chatbot.

2. Onboarding

There is a short onboarding to explicitly help new users know how to interact with Walker. It will provide the keywords to reply during the conversation, which makes it easier for the users to start the conversation.

3. Find all the jobs related to one

If the user inputs a job, it will find a list of related jobs for the user.

4. Find all the skills related to one

If the user inputs a skill, it will find a list of related skills for the user.

5. Know more about Walker

I also set some questions to help the user get to know the chatbot information. The keywords are "what", "Where", "When" and "Why".

6. Talk and cheer up

Walker will ask users' job hunting. If he gets a positive feedback, it will ask the user keep hunting and "start". If negative, it will tell a joke to cheer the user up.

Demo for Walker