Accessible Chatbot Design
- Oct 22, 2020
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 25, 2023
Location: Lima, Peru
Date: Summer 2018
In partnership with MIT MISTI-Peru & La Victoria Lab, I traveled to Lima, Peru for three months to work in Innova Schools, an educational company. My work was to serve as a customer service chat representative for our online platform and design a chat-bot to replace manual communication, accessible to parents with little technology experience.
user-centered design | digital interfaces | customer service | Spanish | innovation environment & teamwork
Timeline: 3 months
What I Learned:
The workings of a design & innovation sector inside a corporation
Professional communication in Spanish
How to seek mentorship & advocate for oneself in a project
Designing UX experience with accessibility as a priority
The reason why I decided to go to Peru through the MISTI Peru program at MIT was very personal - I wanted to go to the country where I was born for a summer and experience a glimpse of the life I might have had if my family had decided to stay. Connecting with roots and family. Connecting with language and food.
All of this mindset extended to my design adventures in Peru.
La Victoria Lab in Lima, Peru is an innovation lab that works on projects for Intercorp, one of the biggest corporations responsible for companies such as Interbank, Inkafarma, and Innova Schools.
http://lavictoria.pe/ The lab primarily designs digital tools to aid the corporation's ventures, but also has become involved in educational ventures, service design, and organizing conferences to celebrate & bolster the spirit of innovation in the country.
When I was able to connect with Oscar Malaspina, one of the founders of the lab, I was inspired by his vision to visit Peru not to look at the streets from my own mixed Peruvian-American identity, but also through an interdisciplinary lens of social awareness, technology, and art that I soon learned had a name: design.
My first day at the lab I was introduced to various designers in the space. I walked, legs shaking, into a vibrant, colorful space full of murals and big, open rooms - a quaint little house at the edge of a one-way street. Posts-its everywhere - sharpies of all different colors. A big painting on the wall to the second floor that said - "Make mistakes first, ask permission second." Even the restroom had positive mantras & funny comics taped to its walls. The kitchen had tea. I had never seen that before! A kitchen in a workplace? Events where designers just came in and talked about innovation? Wow.
My coworker took me on an expedition around the city and into grocery stores with the purpose of showing me differences in aesthetics & price levels depending on what part of the city we were in. Later, my team described this work as Design Research, although at the time I was looking at it more from an anthropological level. I later realized design research can be anthropology, when looked at it from a social justice & behavioral lens.
My time at La Victoria Lab ended as I was assigned a project in Innova Schools - a innovative education company located on the 9th floor of the Interbank Tower. The drives to work during the mornings remain some of my most vivid memories of my time in Peru.
My first job was to manage customer incidences in real time as a online messaging platform was being developed for parents, students, and teachers. For the first month, I managed100-200 questions a day, often juggling many questions at one time. I collaborated with both the programmers and project managers in understanding the issues at hand and communicating those in a timely manner such that the bugs could be fixed in our platform.
Once I became familiar with the questions parents asked, my other main project was to design a chat-bot to reduce this manual messaging labor. This bot to not only needed to appear as welcoming as possible to parents with little technology experience, but it also had to be clear, concise, and friendly. So, to achieve this - I broke down my list of common questions and presented them in a step-by-step approach for the parents.
And so, Betty was born.
Betty. Graphic designed by Luciana Bueno.
In the design process, I asked for feedback from my supervisors and innovation team, all while tweaking the questions and answers in real time based on how parents were stumbling during their interaction with the bot.
In Summary:
As my first internship experience, working with Innova Schools taught me the fundamentals of expectations at the workplace, pacing myself, and communicating with coworkers. Observing my inspiring colleagues, I learned the value of pushing for innovation in the workplace for larger social impact. I immersed myself in various disciplines (coding, web-design, customer-service) and delighted in how my colleagues collaborated across boundaries.
In Peru, I grew as a designer, strengthen my Peruvian identity, and stretched my own ambitions.
Read more about the personal journey here: https://mistiblogs.com/tag/mit-peru/
Thank you to my colleagues Jona, Paola, Anite, Sergio, Luciana, Angie, and Abraham for helping me feel included, challenging me, and bringing so much joy to my experience in Peru.
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