Towards User-Centric Guidelines for Chatbot Conversational Design

The conversational nature of chatbots poses challenges to designers since their development is different from other software and requires investigating new practices in the context of human-AI interaction and their impact on user experience. Therefore, this work aims to unveil text-based chatbot conversational practices alongside their impacts on users to build a web guide to support designers while conceiving conversations for chatbots. We have carried out a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to identify linguistic, visual, and interactive elements used in text-based chatbot conversational design. The SLR resulted in 40 selected studies that were reviewed and coded into a set of conversational guidelines that were evaluated through a survey. Respondents strongly agreed that applying the proposed guidelines in chatbot development would produce greater user satisfaction and user engagement and that the guide is usable, flexible, clear, and understandable, making it a great ally in building text-based chatbots with an improved user experience.