Glen was designed to be an intelligent instant messaging (IM) bot, to help the people who support new IBM employees in India, called RBAs, or Royal Blue Ambassadors. (This was no small feat -- IBM at that time was onboarding several hundred people every month.) My job was to develop a design for this bot.

Challenges

• Finding a way to help the RBAs. On interviewing them, it was more helpful to get them quick answers they could pass on, than to give answers (which might be wrong) to the new hires.
• Keeping context across different RBAs, since the next question might not go to the previous RBA.

What I did

• Interviewed new hires and RBAs
• Designed dialog flow, interaction experience within the constraints of the IM tool, presentation of information in the IM tool, and reporting tool for RBAs
• Developed tests to try real-world runs of the software
• Developed and ran surveys to get feedback from RBAs and new hires

 

For example, here is some of the logic I designed, for the developers to use for Glen:

After our tests, I surveyed the participants: