Domain Specific Design Patterns: Designing For Conversational User Interfaces

Abstract

Designing conversational user interface experience is complicated because conversation comes with many expectations. When these expectations are met, we feel the interface is natural, but once violated, we feel something is amiss. The last decade witnessed human language technologies and behaviours to enable humans converse with software using spoken dialogue to access, create and process information. Less is known about the practicalities of designing chatbot interactions. In this paper, we introduce the nature of conversational user interfaces (CUIs) and describe the underlying technologies they are based on. Moreover, we define guidelines for designing conversational interfaces in various domains. This paper particularly focuses on classifying the elements and techniques used in CUI design patterns. After concluding certain challenges with CUI, we discuss important features and chatbot states to be considered in CUI design for specific domain. We envisage this study to support CUI researchers to design tailored chatbots applicable into certain domain and improve the current state of research challenges in the field of Artificial Intelligence and conversational agents.