Many websites ask visitors to share their contact details or other information. And for many years the best anyone could come up with was a contact form. There are ways to make such forms more inviting, but a contact form shares many characteristics with a nightclub bouncer – it keeps people out. Which is one reason that we’ve started using Conversational Design UI’s. A technique that welcomes website visitors…
Conversational Design
Conversational design is all about creating websites tailored to make your website visitors feel at home. This article provides you with a brief crash course in conversational web design, using an example from our own website.
When people talk about conversational design, they’re often referring to personalization. For example, when you log into your Facebook account, the platform asks what you’re thinking/feeling:
This is one very simple example of conversational design. However, when people now talk about conversational User Interfaces (UI) they’re referring to text-driven conversations, such as chatbots and Slack. So, the term conversational design covers a lot of areas. However, they all have one thing in common: providing a more personal experience.
Advantages
Here’s why that’s a good thing:
- It can help you build trust. Conversational design will help users feel welcome. Which in turn may inspire trust and lead to more conversions.
- You can put the data you collect to good use. Most websites these days collect some personal information from their users. With good conversational design, you increase the chance that site visitors will engage with you.
If your users need to interact with your site in some way, then you should consider looking into conversational design to provide a more personal experience.
Conversational Design on the BSL website
We’ve got a good example on our own website – our contact page.
In the past, we used a traditional contact form – looking like this:
There’s nothing unique here – we just asked people for basic contact details, as well as their main interests (Software Development, Drupal / WordPress, Custom Web applications, or Mobile Apps). We kept it fairly simple, yet we knew from analysing traffic on our website, this could be seen as a barrier.
Even with such a simple, everyday form, we can use Conversational Design to make it more friendly. It’s all built around a single chat, using clean, modern design. The UI is familiar to WhatsApp, and other Chat app users. And this simple twist makes it less of a gatekeeper, and more of a friend.
At the very start, we strike up a conversation with the user:
At each stage of the conversation, users can choose how to reply. Since we’re using predetermined options, the UI is easy to program. And the conversational design interface encourages our site visitors to engage with us. The following video shows you the complete process:
There are two standout points you should take away from our approach to conversational design. Firstly, if you want to include conversational UI’s in your website, you need to make them eye-catching. Play with colours, fonts, and even small animations, creating something to keep the attention of your visitors.
Secondly, conversational UI’s can be great for driving conversions, delivering strong Call To Actions (CTA’s). Since we introduced our conversational contact form (currently only shown on desktop and tablets), we’ve shown an almost 50% increase in responses!
Conclusion
When it comes to web design, there are many approaches possible. There’s Material Design, fluid shapes, hand-drawn elements, and much more. However, conversational web design is more than just a design trend. If you can provide an experience that’s uniquely tailored to each of your visitors, you have an advantage over your competitors.
So why not take a look for yourself, and get in touch with BSL. We can help you to quickly and easily introduce Chatbots and Conversational Design UI’s to your website.
