It took me many years to gathered the knowledge you see here. I speak from my own experience. I did not copy this from someone else. I did read other people’s recommendations to see if it matched mine or to see if I had left some crucial piece of information out. I noticed that on some occasions I had and I added it to the blog post you are reading now.

When a recruiter (or someone who learned to ask questions like a recruiter) needs to assess if you are a good candidate they normally ask a standard set of questions. Now it matters whether you are on the long list or on the shortlist. The questions a recruiter asks to get you on the shortlist are just there to separate the boys from the men or rather, the girls from the women since most UXRs I know are indeed women.

When you are on the shortlist then this is the list of ten things they could ask you. Don’t worry.. after one or two questions the recruiter knows if you’re a good fit or not so you will rarely come as far as to question 10, although I have had that happen to me once or twice. In this day of algorithms and measurability, a recruiter will generally stick to this list of questions. Finally, an outcome of the STEM effect that is in our favor: people stop being creative and simply follow the guide (cynic tone intended).

The questions:

1. Tell me about yourself

2. how would you build trust between you and your manager?

x

I was dumbstruck to the point that I didn’t know what to do next.

Why would a company allow such a terrible experience to exist on their website?
My heart sank in my shoes as I assumed that this could have been the bright idea of a marketing manager to lighten the load on the customer service staff and save costs. Without considering the customer’s needs of course. I have seen it done before.

So I tried ALL the other possibilities to see which one would answer first. The winner was someone who answered me via Messenger. After an hour or so. Not good, but not terrible either.

I decided to look what the current state of chatbots was. I typed in ‘best chatbot 2020 for users’ in Google and viewed the results.

As I scrolled down the page, I only saw results that promoted bots. Mostly from a sales point of view.

Where oh where was an article that looked at chatbots from a user’s p.o.v.?

As I came to the end of page one I couldn’t find anything that satisfied me, so for the first time in a long time, I clicked on page 2 of the search results. And finally, halfway the page was an article on the website of the Nielsen Norman Group called ‘The User Experience of Chatbots’. The article was from 2018. Fine.

The first sentence of that article is: The chatbot is the poor relative of the intelligent assistant. which looked promising enough for me to continue reading. The article goes on to say that chatbot growth and popularity is motivated by at least three different factors:

1. The hope to reduce customer-service costs by replacing human agents with bots
2. The success of conversational-based systems put forward the idea of chatbots as an interaction channel with businesses and services
3. The popularity of voice-based intelligent assistants such as Alexa and Google Home has pushed many businesses to emulate them at a smaller scale.

I leave it to you to read the article yourself. My key takeaway is that there is still a long way to go before a chatbot or digital assistant is able to help you as a real person can. However, there are situations where bots are useful. When users deal with simple and linear tasks for example. Speed was seen as the most important advantage of a bot over a human in that case.

All in all, I feel a bit bad that I took this company as an example for this post. But I also feel that they could have made more of an effort to get it right.

Just follow the advice that the NN group gives you:

NN/g’s UX Guidelines for Designing Chatbots:

• Be upfront about using a bot and not a human.
• Clearly tell people what tasks the bot can do.
• Make sure you don’t create false expectations.
• Don’t be overly ambitious: create bots for simple tasks. Complexity is not well handled in the limited bot interface.
• Tolerate typos and ambiguity.
• Allow people to interact with the bot both through free-text input and selection of links.
• Allow sorting and filtering to let people narrow down through results.
• Save information from one task to the next.
• Program some flexibility into the bot: infer context and allow people to jump forward and backward in the linear flow.
• Be honest about not understanding. Offer an escape hatch in the form of a real human, a phone number, or a link to a different interaction channel.