Guidelines 🚀 5 best practices for chatbot design in Landbot 🤖
Updated 10 months ago
When you get started working with Landbot, it might be useful not only to know the basics of building a chatbot, but also having an overview on some guidelines and best practices, especially for larger and complex bots. 🤖
- Plan it before you build it! ✏️
You can’t build a house without a project, right? 🏠Well, it’s kind of the same with conversations! 💬
First thing, try to think of the number of flows, or stories that your bot is going to tell.
The stories can have different paths inside it, just like chapters in a book.
🔹 How many stories do you want to tell?
🔹 How many different paths can the user take when chatting with the bot?
🔹 Do they have an order to follow?
🔹 Do the chapter have distinct subsections or paragraphs?
🔹 Do you want the user go back to the start to be able to take a different path, or do you want to end the conversation with a human interaction? or maybe you want the user to be able to share the bot on social medias?
Those are questions that you might want to answer before you start, and they can help you make decisions that will guide you through your work.
Try to visualize these flows, it may sound hard, but it’s quite easy!
You can pick up pen and paper and draw a simplified flowchart to keep in mind all the decisions you made.
✅ DO’s: Have a checklist, draw a flowchart.
❌ DONT’s: Start without a previous brainstorming! - Follow your own stories!
That’s the moment to start building in Landbot! 🤖
Now that you know exactly how many flows do you need, you can start building them in order.
You can start with the first flow, positioning each new block horizontally.
Of course there can be many connections coming out of a block, but you can still keep following the direction of the main flow.
When you need to tell a different story, you can start another flow below the first one, and follow again the horizontal line, just like you do when writing! đź–‹
When you're ready, have a look at these articles to learn about the builder essentials.
✅ DO’s: Follow the order you previously established and stick to it, and if something new comes to your mind you can easily integrate it after.
❌ DONT’s: Build many blocks without a logic behind.
- Keep it logic and readable.
Try to avoid superpositions of blocks (you have infinite virtual space!) and circular flows, because it can look very confusing when go go back to it!
Of course you can connect a final block with the first (or previous) one, but you should be able to look at them as the start point and end point of a horizontal line.
If the final block is “far away” from the first, the Jump To 🔗 block can help you go back to the start without having to connect the last and first block with a very long arrow.
Also, make sure all your blocks are connected into the flow, meaning they all should have at least an arrow pointing to them (except, of course, the first one).
Here you can find more information about the Jump To block.
✅ DO’s: Build blocks with a fair distance to each other, in a linear way.
❌ DONT’s: Superposition of blocks, building a flow in “circle” or multiple directions. - Keep it organized and clear (and if you want, reusable!)
Finally, you can use Bricks 🧱 to keep your work organized and your mind clear.
You can select multiple blocks and click on “Create a Brick” to have all those blocks grouped in one site, just like a folder on your computer.
You can group all your main sections or “stories” into different bricks, and even have bricks inside other bricks to collect your different paths or “chapters” of your stories.
Having Bricks will also make the bot lighter and reduce loading time.
If you need, you can make a Brick reusable, converting it into a Brick template! This is particularly useful if you want to replicate the Brick in another part of the bot.
Here you can find an article dedicated to the Bricks.
✅ DO’s: Have your blocks grouped and organized in Bricks.
❌ DONT’s: Have a large and complex bot with no Bricks, or create too many level of nested Bricks. - Test, test, test!
Last but not least, it can be useful to test your bot as you go, to be immediately aware of how it looks and feels like.
If you build everything without testing it first, it will be a lot harder and tedious to find and solve errors, or go back and change things that you don’t like.
Here you have an article on how to test your bot through the Share URL
✅ DO’s: Test as you build the bot using the Preview or from the Share URL
❌ DONT’s: Create a lot of blocks and test it all at the end.