The idea of an AI takeover looks spectacular and otherwordly in the Matrix or Terminator movies. But has anyone expected that, in reality, artificial intelligence will manifest itself as neat popup windows offering to answer your questions around the clock?
From the professional designer's point of view, creating a chatbot UI is similar to designing any other user interface. Having developed web and mobile applications from scratch for five years, Arounda shares the main principles of the chatbot user interface. We will also discuss outstanding chatbot UI design examples and chatbot interface best practices.
Table of Contents
What is a Chatbot UI?
The idea of the chatbot interface is to augment computer code generated by the program with graphical and language elements that human beings can perceive. Simply put, the chatbot UI is the program's part that users can see and interact with. It includes menus, texts, response buttons, contact forms, avatars, icons, animations, and more.
What's the Difference Between UI and UX?
The ‘user interface’ (UI) focuses more on the product's visual representation and emotional impact. The ‘user experience’ UX refers mainly to how users perceive the chatbot's functionality, such as its AI core.
Chatbot UI UX design is an interconnected system. For example, the way a big blue button looks is the UI domain. But what happens when you press it and whether it feels good or not is in the UX domain.
9 Best Chatbot UI Examples
Examining the most prominent existing chatbots will give you hints on how to build chatbot UI of your own. Let’s start!
Tidio
Tidio is a free chatbot builder. It allows you to create a bot from scratch or to adapt pre-written template scripts for your needs. The Tidio chatbot interface is highly customizable. You can modify icons, color palettes, greeting messages, backgrounds, and other visuals to suit your brand identity. Also, Tidio can work together with dozens of eCommerce tools like Hubspot, Google Analytics, WordPress, and Shopify.
Kuki AI
This chatbot is famous for its AI capabilities. Kuki won the Loebner Prize several times and is often named the most human-like chatbot. The interface looks simple yet sleek. Users communicate with the bot through open-ended messages, there are no preset topics or questions.
Landbot
This tool requires no extra knowledge of coding. Instead, you can create a chatbot using a drag-and-drop interface and ready-made templates within minutes. All the style elements like fonts, background colors, and icons are easy to adjust for your website. Unlike Kuki, the Landbot interface has a button menu, and the flow of the conversation is clearly structured.
Replika
The Replika is an AI companion who learns from conversations and becomes increasingly familiar with your habits, likes, dislikes, and routines. The platform encourages you to write diaries, share interests and precious moments, and build good habits. Replika’s interface is highly customizable. Users can select the background, switch to dark mode, and upload photos that will personalize their virtual partner. UI design strives to make using the chatbot as cozy as possible.
Wysa
Wysa is the award-winning clinically validated AI with the mission to improve people's mental health. It was designed as a research instrument and anonymous support for employees who suffer from depression and anxiety and yet keep silent about their mental states due to stigma or lack of awareness. The chatbot’s interface with a light pastel palette and a cute penguin avatar is in line with this purpose.
Drift
Drift is a conversation cloud platform that helps to automate customer service at every stage of the buyer’s journey. The service incorporates conversation AI, regular chat, chat-to-call, chat-to-zoom, video, and e-mail functions. It allows marketing, sales, and service teams to interact with the customer in every possible way that they choose without wasting time on switching between the tools. Drift proposes lots of customizable avatars and quick reply buttons.
WHO chatbot
This Facebook chatbot was launched by the World Health Organization to fight the ignorance and panic caused by COVID-19. WHO chatbot gives instant and accurate information about the pandemic. As a narrow-purpose information assistant, the chatbot uses only pre-defined buttons and collects no feedback. But it can guide you through the test about COVID and give the latest global statistics.
Lark
Did you know that you have more chances to lose weight if you have a partner in this affair? Lark contextual chatbot is a digital coach that reminds you to eat better, move more and stress less. Lark communicates as a supporting and humorous person who lives in your mobile app. You can address it with buttons, text, and voice. The interface is designed in green color, conveying the feeling of calmness.
Erica
Erica is a virtual financial assistant used by the Bank of America. It represents information about your spending habits, recurring charges, or account balance in the form of graphs and images. Customers can give text or voice queries about their finance. Erica is designed in calm navy blue that resonates with rational and cool thinking.
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Chatbot UI Best Practices
Your chatbot may have different purposes. You might want to shorten a response time or give your clients a taste of the carrying community. The following chatbot UI best practices will help you in most cases.
Choose a catchy name to evoke curiosity.
Create a well-considered script. This is the most time-consuming and the most vital part of chatbot UI.
Pump your bot with helpful data about who you are, your product or service providers, FAQs, and common concerns.
Use visual effects such as strong colors, background videos, or a charming animated welcome screen.
Add customization features like changing the text color of the users’ message.
How to Customize Chatbot Interface
Usually, a chatbot is implemented into a website or a company's mobile app. It should visually reassemble the brand color scheme, logos, and tone of voice. This makes customization a must.
Chatbot builders like Tidio allow you to change almost everything in your chatbot appearance and behavior. Unless you want to program a unique decision tree or a complex contextual algorithm, pre-defined templates provide a sufficient level of customization.
Principles of Chatbot UI design
The chatbot interface will vary depending on the type of algorithm. Menu-based chatbots will propose reply options in the form of buttons. Linguistic-based or rule-based chatbots will look like a good old chat window, although these programs are more costly than ones with button options.
Still, the main rules of UI design apply to all chatbot types. A quality chatbot UI should be:
easy to understand and use
visually pleasant
enjoyable and engaging
customizable
Final Thoughts
The competition in the market sets the bar high for the chatbot UI. Chatbot builders allow you to create an efficient, even human-like conversation instrument with chatbot UI design templatesfor free. The basic knowledge of UI/UX principles we share in this article will be of use.
Arounda team has accumulated expertise in UI/UX design in more than 130 projects. If you need a hand with a chatbot, web, or mobile app design, we are here for you.
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Frequently asked questions
- What is a chatbot UI?
Chatbot UI is a part of the program that the user interacts with. If you compare a chatbot to a human body, UI will represent the skin color, the haircut, and clothes.
- What are the chatbot UI elements?
Chatbot interface includes: title, text scripts, menus, contact forms, reply options, link, visuals like icons, avatars, animations, or welcoming screens
- What are the four types of chatbots?
Depending on the algorithm which allows the chatbot to answer the customer's query, we can distinguish four basic chatbot types: menu-based chatbots, rule-based chatbots, keyword recognition-based chatbots, contextual chatbots
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