With the rising popularity of AI, chatbots are rapidly becoming an essential part of any customer-oriented platform. More and more companies now integrate them into apps and websites, providing a space for their clients to interact with the business itself while taking load off human employees and reducing expenses on the customer support team. At first glance, chatbots might seem pretty uncomplicated in their design and functionality, but creating UI/UX design for chatbots requires a deep understanding of this technology and the way they can serve both business and its users. Here are some useful tips for creating a successful user experience in AI chatbot:

Study the product/platform thoroughly
As a small but vital part of the product, chatbot should harmonize with the brand design and the platform it's integrated into. That's why the first and foremost job of a designer in this case is to thoroughly study the product, making the bot correspond to its style, color palette and other parameters. The next step is to study the capabilities of the app or a website and choose between custom-designing the bot inside the platform or integrating a ready-made bot with already existing AI tools. It depends on the platform technical characteristics and limitations, as well as on the project’s budget and scale.
Determine the bot’s functionality
Chatbots can serve various purposes: from answering users' questions and giving them suggestions to guiding through the payment process and solving tech issues. The bot’s design should correspond to its purpose – there is no need to overload a low-function bot with unnecessary elements, while a high-function bot should have more advanced features and be more structured to provide a sense of security.
Define the bot’s style of conversation
Chatbots interact with users in predetermined patterns, and the way these patterns are constructed also depends on the bot’s purpose and function span. Here, a UX designer should define the bot’s style of conversation: which specific words are allowed and/or forbidden, is it appropriate to add emoji or stickers, should the bot answer in a formal or in a friendly manner, etc. All these factors play a huge role in users’ perception of the bot and the quality of user experience the tool provides.
Make in-bot navigation easy and clear
When interacting with a chatbot, users should have a clear understanding of how this tool can help them and what actions they should perform to get the desired result, otherwise it can turn into a useless endless conversation. Detailed UX design guides users through these interactions: for example, the welcoming message in the bot should state its purpose clearly, while a set of buttons should offer concise commands to present which actions the bot can perform and relieve users from having to word their request. It’s also important to avoid creating false expectations: for instance, allowing only closed-ended questions eliminates the risk of situations when bot doesn’t know how to respond.
Provide secure and respectful interactions
Two of the most important factors to consider when integrating a chatbot into any platform are data security and respectful interaction, and in order to get a successful experience users should be confident the bot can provide them with both. The way a chatbot interacts hugely depends on the data it was trained on, so whether creating a bot from scratch or integrating a ready-made one, it is vital to train it only on safe data, and conduct multiple testing sessions to assess any risks related to personal data leakage and inappropriate interaction scenarios.
Program context-awareness and flexibility
Context plays a huge role in human conversation, so for an effective human-bot interaction it is vital to teach the bot a certain level of contextual awareness. This can be implemented by creating a set of prompts that can be used as replies in various scenarios, considering the user's background, personal data, previous conversations with the bot and other factors. It is also important to make the bot flexible, as not all conversations are linear: sometimes people can jump backward and forward in the flow of interaction, especially if they are nervous about a certain problem that they’ve come to the bot with, and the bot should react accordingly without cutting the conversation off.
Design solutions for challenging situations
No matter how perfectly designed and trained the bot is, it is still a robotic instrument that can sometimes fail to “understand” humans and is prone to confusing moments while having a conversation. A UX designer’s job is to create respectful and easily perceived fail responses that guide users back to the existent interaction without making them feel left out. One of the great ways to do that is provide buttons with alternative commands that help re-active the bot in case it fails to understand any request. In case the bot fails to continue the conversation, users should be provided with other options to get help – a phone number, e-mail address, link to other interaction channels or a client support agent.
Constantly study feedback after launch
As in case of any software product, it is necessary to constantly track chatbot’s user data and check feedback in order to eliminate bugs and generally improve the product every now and then. To do that, designers can implement a user survey feature in the bot: for instance, when the conversation ends, users can be offered to evaluate the bot’s work by pressing a button with thumbs up or thumbs down emoji, or answer a simple survey question. It’s important to note that whatever way the survey is gathered, it should be very concise and unobtrusive, so that it won’t irritate users by taking their time and spoil the overall impression. There are also various analytic tools for chatbots that can help UX designers gather failure reports and track all the necessary data up, including the precisely detailed info.

Conclusion
The rise of AI tools and chatbots brought a new way of interaction between businesses and clients that no one could think of just a few years ago. Designing chatbots requires an understanding of how these tools function and what makes them helpful for users. Crafting a good UX design for chatbots results in providing users with a respectful, understanding and efficient assistant that can solve certain problems in a short span of time. There is also a high probability that chatbots are just a step to more advanced future interaction technologies, so studying ways to work with them is a must for any UX designer that wants to keep up with the tech development.