Ah!!! Ten days of hard work, sleepless nights, and finally, we are ready with our new user interface for building chatbots. We were featured on Product Hunt this month, and heavy traffic started coming in afterwards. As a startup, we hardly found time to work on the product in previous 15 days.

We built many functionalities and features based on users’ feedback but what we recently did was a mixture of data analysis and user’s feedback.

We have revamped the UI of Botsify.

There were many ifs and buts before we started working on it, but finally we managed to do something we can get user’s feedback on. We, with Botsify, are working on letting everyone build chatbots for messenger. We know how painful the process can be for a non-programmer. Having a HTTPS oriented site? Come on, what’s the SSL certificate?

So we recognized there is a market for people who want to build chatbot without any coding knowledge. Remember the era of “Drag and drop” website builders?

We previously had a nice video as soon as the user would login, we had a very false assumption that t user would watch that 18 minutes video before getting-started and understanding terminology like “Webhook and page access token”.

Our competitor “chatfuel” is doing amazing stuff at the user experience level. We recognized that something is missing at our end, and that was the interface for which people don’t have to watch a video. But when you make a tall claim.

Built a chatbot for facebook messenger, our easy interface suits everyone.

People are expecting much more and that was the case with us.

Now, we do not have a drag an id drop builder but something similar. Here is how it looks now.

Botsify new template designer

Good job! When we get the idea of Botsify we started exploring how our competitors were doing. We started with “rule based chatbots” because we assumed that a non-programmer might get confused or overwhelmed by the term “Artificial Intelligence”. We explored some of the interfaces and noticed a few things.

Relatively hard UI/UX of API.ai and FlowXo

1- Flows and user stories are nice interface but we don’t think it would be nice user experience as well.

2- Terms and features like intent, entities and webhook could confuse a normal user who is new to the platform. We started aiming to use less of such keywords in our content.

3- Provide a platform with interface they have experienced or used before.

Here are the few user interfaces of chatbot builders we analyzed and learned these things.

I was happy that some of the competitors were thinking just like us, ManyChat and Chatfuel are to name a few. They have been working on “Telegram” platform before they must have learned a lot through the way.

Botsify response editor

Here is what we nailed it down to, we have a nice mobile messenger screen on the right and simple boxes (User says and The bot says) in the form. As soon as user starts typing, the chat bubble appears within the messenger. What’s more? The interface will render your created templates on the fly and preview it just like it would show in the messenger.

Botsify response editor

Saying that, we are core believers of lean startup methodology and hence believe in these things as assumptions unless tested; now we are aiming to analyze our results for improvements. One thing is for sure, with the evolution of “Chatbots”, user experience of chatbots and chatbot builders is going to matter so much, who knows it becomes a field of study as well!