Individual Project
Conversational UX, Chatbot Dialog
Duration
Mar.'20 - May.'20
Tools
Botsociety, Botmock, Mural, Lucidchart
Professor
Rebecca Evanhoe
A chatbot helps remind people of key steps and solve some major types of problems in furniture assembly.
RESEARCH
Understand the problems and challenges
How many people prefer to assemble IKEA furniture on their own?
How people rate the user experience of IKEA guide books?
What people most care about when they are looking for assistance?
Survey
Goal: to get an overall knowledge of my product's potential scope and design opportunities.
29 Responses
Results
The survey shows that most people are still not satisfied with IKEA guide books and have met some difficulties in the past assembly experience.
Interview
Goal: to learn more details about IKEA guide book’s drawbacks and improvement possibilities.
1 in person + 2 remote
Findings
User behavior in furniture assemblyPain points of IKEA guide books
Expectations toward an assistant
PERSONA
This chatbot is a friendly and helpful furniture assembly assistant that provides efficient extra instruction besides IKEA guide books. It has a low level of personification, which could serve as a more intuitive tool using conversational user experience design compared with image-only interaction.
Benchmarks
Low Personification
Efficiency is the fundamental feature of the chatbot. This IKEA assistant should give users information quickly and correctly. So a none-human-like character will be appropriate.
Power Dynamics
The chatbot should be activated all the time when users assemble their furniture. It should always monitor the step that the user is currently doing and give prompt, useful, and appropriate feedback.
Tone
Character Traits
INTERACTION MODEL
Slots, Intents, and Utterances

The stickers in green color were what I added after the usability testing.
FLOW DIAGRAMS
PROTYTYPE
After brainstorming some sample scrips, I began to write dialogs for the chatbot. Due to the time limitation, I focused the sample conversations on two features:
Help understand the image and find out the correct screws
Help check the direction of the board in the previous step
botsocietyClick here to interact with the prototype
USABILITY TESTING
2 synchronously interview + 3 unsynchronously questionnaire
Findings
Things that still lack in current design
"visually videos would be better than back and forth text."
Pain points of the current design
Recommendations
Videos, 3D models, or real products are not existing in the IKEA assembly guide system, but in the future, if IKEA provides these features for furniture, this chatbot will also add that.
ITERATION
botsocietyClick here to view the new prototype
Flow Diagram
The original flow was to let users type which step they are doing, however, typing words is difficult when their hands are occupied with furniture elements. So I decided to present all steps individually, and if users have no problem, they can simply tap the button to skip this step.
For the checking intent, I planned to add a feature that users can take a photo of their current situation and upload to the chatbot, and then the back-end recognition system can automatically analyze whether it is right or wrong.
View the flow diagram again
FUTURE THOUGHTS
From my perspective, designing more customized paths for chatbot will make the interaction model more complicated with more varieties. Though it will be hard to write utterances for all intents, what conversational developers can do is to apply machine learning or other algorithms to train the chatbox to recognize keywords more accurately and thus learn what people say.