Expot: A Conversational Assistant for Expats
Fall 2021 | Conversational UX Project
Expot in a Nutshell
Expot is a conversational interface prototyped for people who are moving internationally. It aims to assist people in their process of expatriation or repatriation.
When moving abroad a person must complete numerous tasks simultaneously: complete necessary documents, look for housing, formulate a way to stabilize themselves financially and keep a healthy mindset about all the farewells and new encounters with other cultures.
Being a conversational system, Expot would help users get ready for the big move and it would also try to keep them balanced after moving out too. Ideally the system would accomplish this by meeting with the user before the move and preparing them for their own unique experience.
My Role
conversational ux designer
Tools
Voiceflow, Lucid Chart, Miro
Timespan
2 months
this video summarizes expot
Why develop a conversational interface for expats? Research and relevance
Expot is a conversational interface prototyped for people who are moving internationally. It aims to assist people in their process of expatriation or repatriation.
When moving abroad a person must complete numerous tasks simultaneously: complete necessary documents, look for housing, formulate a way to stabilize themselves financially and keep a healthy mindset about all the farewells and new encounters with other cultures.
Being a conversational system, Expot would help users get ready for the big move and it would also try to keep them balanced after moving out too. Ideally the system would accomplish this by meeting with the user before the move and preparing them for their own unique experience.
expot tries to smooth the emotional ups and downs an expat faces when relocating
How should expot sound?
The personality of the interface was developed based on the 4 main insights derived from mixed research methods of digital ethnography, literature review and exploratory user interviews.
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Successful expatriation begins with thorough preparation.
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Successful expatriation begins with thorough preparation.
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Loneliness is very common among expats, but the cause of it is different for everybody.
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Users need to be familiarized with the culture they are going to be in beforehand.
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A conversational agent for this task should be sincere, empathetic yet protect its distance as an expert.
What will the Expot say and hear? Scripting and creating intents
Guided by the personality, sample scripts were created on imaginary scenarios to show how would Expot act in different situations with different users. To help with prototyping, flow maps were also built.
Among them two were selected to be prototyped: first was a document checklist function. In that function, users would interact with the product to keep track of their visa documents.
The second one was the adjustment check in function. In that one Expot would start a conversation with users after they have moved to their new country, to see how they are doing.
How would you interact with Expot? Creating high fidelity prototypes
Merging all insights from initial user feedback, data and using flow maps as reference, two functions of the Expot is prototyped using Voiceflow.
You may test the prototypes for yourself here
And here
a screenshot of miro board used for low-fi user testing
Building a functional conversational interface: Future work for Expot
User feedback from 4 testers for expot have shown that it successfully represents its intended personality goals. Interaction feels comfortable and sensible. Yet, it needs more features and development.
Keeping in mind that it is just a prototype, the user feedback, the research and the expert feedback (from Rebecca Evanhoe) has shown that Expot is a very viable idea and could actually be realized.
For me, this makes this conversational interface a big success.
having a user session for the high fidelity prototype