Global Citizens Whatsapp Chatbot
Making activism accessible to people around the world
Global Citizens is a United Nations Foundation partner non-profit organization that enables people around the world to be actively involved in politics by rewarding advocacy with points that can be redeemed for prizes like a summer music festival with stars like Coldplay & Lady Gaga.
The Ask
Global Citizens asked us to figure out the best way to translate their website into a Whatsapp Chatbot so that global citizens from countries with limited broadband access (starting with Sub-Saharan Africa) could also participate.
The Problem
How do we translate Global Citizens, the brand and its advocacy program, into a chatbot in a way that makes sense to new and familiar audiences, communicates the organization’s vision and purpose, and is navigable and visually appealing?
The Solution
(Step 1)
The first thing I did was dissect the objective of the nonprofit & what role the website played in accomplishing how they wanted to address their different audiences - people who want to learn about GC, sign up for GC, or already are part of GC. That helped me settle on the 5 most important things the chatbot needed to accomplish aka the feature set.
(Step 2)
Now that I knew what the chatbot needed to do, I had to figure out how to design a chatbot. I looked at notable chatbots across industries, broke down their features, and pulled out what made them great to build a list of best design and engineering practices.
(list of best practices below)
Creating a chatbot was a really incredible way for me to understand and predict different combinations of user flows. Creating a seamless experience on a chatbot required giving the user highly specific instructions and guidelines to choose and navigate options.
It was also a great exercise in learning how to make digital experiences feel more human by building & showing a personality.
Meet Sven! The Whatsapp Bot/Bouncer to Absolut Vodka’s exclusive party. He was pretty instrumental for me to understand how the personality of a bot could be used to enhance customer experience.
Here’s the link to full presentation!
It was presented not only to our internal team of developers and designers but also to our client & their internal team of developers to summarize the scope & our goals within the first meeting. I used the deck to keep a bunch of tools to chatbot prototyping for our UX designer & a guide on Sandbox for our engineers.