Rulai, Inc.

Personalizing virtual assistant demos

UX

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Internship

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2022

Rulai Inc.

Integrated 60+ conversational AI features into a new demo system, improving customization to win more customer and partner opportunities.

Role
UX Design
Conversation Design
Solution Engineering
Front-end Engineering
Team
Daniel Chen (Developer)
Law Black (Sales)
Lawrence Yau (Product Manager)
Duration
3 months

sole designer at a low code platform

Rulai is a low-code AI Virtual Assistant platform for businesses.

Through the summer of 2022, I joined Rulai as the sole designer. To tackle the inquiries from businesses in various industries and sizes, I designed a new live demo system that allows prospects to explore the Virtual Assistant Studio in their own desired way. They can ask about a specific use case, and interact with the tool to see its corresponding features being built in action.

it was difficult to understand audience interests without the ability to talk to them

Working with so many conversational AI features, I had a problem with knowing which audience might be most interested in using what features. They may want virtual assistants to do totally different things, and I did not have the authority to meet Rulai's current customers.

A list of industries that expressed interest in the Virtual Assistant product
Compiling a list of industries that expressed interest in the virtual assistant product.

Studying user analytics and transcripts, I discovered a finding that first felt counterintuitive to me but later helped me determine the structure of the demo:

  • Larger enterprises tend to prioritize the ease of use to build virtual assistants with limited resources, thereby relying more complex support from Rulai.
  • Modest-sized businesses aim to start with more small-scale, straightforward solutions and get more hands-on with customization themselves.

Because of Rulai's new emphasis on obtaining parterships with smaller businesses, I decided to prioritize targeting their needs in the demo.

cookie-cutters can work well when coming in many shapes

Considering the needs of simpler solutions, I thought about using a set list of predetermined scenarios tackling common tasks for the demo. But this cookie-cutter approach won't address the demand for more freedom to fine-tune the assistants with customers' own data.

Workflow for the scheduling a delivery use case
For the “scheduling a delivery” use case, I integrated some of the most common features such as carousel display, user recognition, and data access and retrieval.

So I tried another approach on top of the cookie-cutter solution: breaking the demo structure into multiple independednt use cases. Each use case will focus on solving one user problem with a set of features, and audience can change up the problem and explore the process of tuning the assistant to adapt to the new constraints.

Putting multiple use cases together
Applying other features to different uses cases, coming up with conversation scripts, and implementing the Virtual Assistant.

After implementing the first use case, our team presented a mock demo to the rest of the teams and executives. They ended up agreeing with the "transformable" cookie-cutters appraoch and gave us the green light to work on the rest of the demo!

little personality never killed nobody

When testing the rest of the use cases, I found out that taking the time to bring up the content fidelity can make demos much more convincing. I went back to brush up details in the first use case, giving personalities to the Virtual Assistant, expanding scripts for different user behaviors, and applying brand identity to the user interface.I learned to pay attention to terminologies and tones I use when delivering the presentation.

Making the demo logo 3D
Although it didn't end up in the final product demonstration, I had some fun experimenting with branding the demo bot, making the the logo popped into 3D using a cool tool called Spline.
I developed a mock website to host the demo Virtual Assistant
As the use cases became more polished, I developed a mock website to host the demo Virtual Assistant. This provides a playground for prospects to interact with the tool themselves.

the result