The Company

Latcha+Associates is a full-service marketing company based in Farmington Hills, MI. They offer clients a range of services including web and app development.

My Role

I was a UX / UI Designer at Latcha where I led the design of new products for clients like Audi and Ford. My role for this project was to design a chatbot experience including the chatbot’s personality, key functions, and conversational UI.

The Product

The product is a chatbot that helps Latcha employees complete everyday work tasks like requesting paid time off. I named the bot the "Computational Human Resources Intelligent Service" or CHRIS. 

The development team and I created CHRIS because we wanted to learn about how to build a chatbot so we could take what learned and build a bot for a client. 

The Challenges

1. Understand the possibilities and constraints of designing a chatbot experience using IBM Watson
2. Research, establish, and document design principles for building an effective chatbot
3. Help the team understand the design process for creating a chatbot

The Design Process

The project began with a kickoff meeting, where I discussed the CHRIS’s functionality and project goals with the developers and leadership. I then played with various chatbots to learn about conventions and opportunities to innovate. With a basic understanding of chatbots, my developer and I worked together on defining the communication flow between the user and the bot. The messy diagram below is a snipped of a much larger flow chart.

At the same time, I began documenting CHRIS's personality. I used the “Big Five personality traits," a model that defines personalities using five factors like conscientiousness and extraversion. I shared this document with the team to help create a unified vision for the bot.

I then designed the UI for the chat window iteratively alongside my developer. The UI consisted of conversation as well as standard controls like buttons and date pickers. As I iterated the design, my developer built CHRIS using HTML / CSS, various API calls, and IBM Watson, the backend for CHRIS's functionality. 

I recruited several Latcha employees to interact with CHRIS, and worked with my developer in improving the bot based on what we learned. I documented what I learned in a list of design principles that I shared with the team. This document helped promote a user-centered design approach across the team and leadership.

We launched CHRIS to the entire company. However, by this time I had accepted another job offer, so unfortunately I could not see this project through. Designing CHRIS was one of the most interesting and compelling projects I've worked on, and I hope to work on another chat bot in the future. Check out a video of CHRIS: