The Problem
There are not enough women in leadership roles in corporate America. Females constitute 57% of the graduate degrees in the US, but only 4% of Fortune 500 companies are run by women. The equation is not working. Women in the workforce have many questions and they need answers and mentoring.
The Idea
The Bot:
An asynchronous chat experience that serves personally-curated, on-demand content across FB messenger and our client’s main website.
The Platform:
A forum-like section within their main website that houses exclusive content organized by topic, such as celebrity, keyword, etc.
My role
I led the design team, provided UX guidance, and facilitated workshops with internal stakeholders and the client.
Together with content strategists and copywriters, we defined the bot’s personality, conversation structure, user stories and flows.
Project Goals
- Use content from their website and present it in a way that is modular and relatable to link to popular topics in culture.
- Share content from influencers.
- Create a hub on their website to share content, where users could watch, share, and discuss videos.
- A system for managing video assets, from spoken-word audio, and distributing content.
- Accessible content from both desktop and mobile with a focus on the Facebook community by way of Facebook Messenger.
- Ensure that an MVP would be ready by the middle of March to test at SXSW.
My Approach
The timeline for this project was short, just four to five weeks. I decided to run a sprint over the course of a week, from Monday to Friday. Then I repeated this weekly until the end of the project.
My approach entails:
-Understanding the user’s needs derived from my daily conversations with stakeholders and actual potential user interviews.
-Analyzing and observing from research.
-Brainstorming and discussing new ideas from user insights with the team and stakeholders.
-Prototyping deliverables and presenting them to clients.
-Testing and validating new ideas with the clients, collecting all feedback and applying it to our next iteration.
Research & Discovery
Conversations with stakeholders
I conducted stakeholder interviews, and casual chats were made with core team members to get a better sense of their expectations, desires, concerns, goals, as well as assumptions and attitudes towards the project.
I suggested a quick workshop, to align with the team and assure that we are all on the same page in regards to the bot and the hub.
I ran simple exercises, where I put together user profiles, user journeys, and business goals.
Planning
What kind of bot are we building?
Deciding what kind of bot we’ll be building was crucial to frame the timeline of the project moving forward - what type of chatbot is feasible for our MVP release?
My research combined with analysis of existing chatbots and conversational apps along conversations with the VP of technology and audits of our client's infrastructure, available development resources and goals were used to educate our stakeholders on the top-level decision, constraints and scope for the bot.
We were using a Natural Language Processor which is AI but leveraging an AI platform not building one; our bot will work with intention detection instead of a decision tree
Define
Great information
I collected plenty of information from my research and workshop, I started sketching on whiteboards and setting the ecosystems for the whole experience, the user journeys and flows and first attempts on the hub. At the end of the week, we should be able to show a very initial prototype of the bot and a deck explaining our plan.
My drawings helped us to validate some hypothesis and assumptions made during our prior brainstorms
Personality
I had a great time defining the personality of our bot, I have to confess that this was the easiest part. Our client and the bot had a well defined personality, great attitude, amazing stories and tons of energy. That was super easy to achieve and translate in our flows and conversations. I used a Brand attributes chart that could help us to initiated the conversation about it personality
Core content pillars
Content strategist came up with six main content pillars to give us a better direction for the known categories.
Work/Life Balance
Maternity, parenting, balance, family, work, community, support, marriage, PTO, leave, job sharing
Getting Ahead
Pay, promotion, advancement, raise, value, soft skills, negotiation, reviews, growth plan
Own Your Brand
Networking, visibility, style, respect, leading, perspective, opinion, voice, confidence, goals
Leadership
Delegation, roles, team-building, synergy, motivation, hiring, teaching, leadership, managing, collaboration, talent, training, empowerment
Equality
Unconscious bias, culture, gender equality, leadership gap, accountability, change the conversation, action, diversity, solutions, progress
Navigating Challenges
Hostile, harassment, awkward, challenge, confrontation, aggression, coworker
Ideate
A clear direction
After all the information and direction from stakeholders. I was ready to move forward with initial sketches, drawings, flows, wireframes and whiteboarding sessions.
Prototype
Conclusion
During the time I created this case study, the bot was being tested at SXSW. I worked with strategy to craft questions for a quantitative analysis and our client wanted to prepare testing of the MVP at one of her talks.
Our client was very satisfied with the progress and excited to share the bot with the community. The expectations are to have the platform and the bot running by this summer and perform more usability testing so that we can keep shaping the bot’s personality and the content that the bot provides.