Making Chatterly & its hot pink lipstick flow
I’d hoped for something more meaty to show at Unparsed. But time moves faster than tech, so I just took a deep breath and decided to just show up with where I am.
So! I created a fake brand, Gerrod’s Beauty, to help inform the bot’s language and flow. The brand mission is this:
"Gerrod’s Beauty embraces makeup as the ultimate form of self-expression. It’s fun, liberating, and most importantly, transformative. Makeup is our everything. We love and cater to Power Users who transform their clients and themselves into works of art. We hold Drag as the ultimate art form and celebrate every flavor of Drag artist there is."
Gerrod’s bot serves as a cheeky assistant to our three main power user examples: Drag Artists, Professional Makeup Artists, and folks who obsess over makeup tutorials. We call them Rabbit Holers for reasons that are #obvo.
Gender: 88% women; 8% men; 4% non-binary
Age: Skew 35-50, but ~15% 20s, and 50+: Professionals who know their way around productions and are entrusted with skin health of clients
The work demands products that will hold on stage and studio lights:
Fast drying
Anti-caking
Long lasting
Water proof
"Always on the hunt for inspiration to bring the drama to my world."
Key user testing question to ask: Knowing the imagined brand holds Drag as the ultimate form of expression, are the bot’s Drag memes and expressions appropriation or representation? Or something in-between?
Quality ingredients are huge. Their reputation depends on it.
Need products for my kit that will suit all skin sensitivity levels.
All-natural, cruelty-free, vegan is important.
I can’t rely on a headshot for true color.
I have to have 5 or 6 alternatives that might work.
"My work involves quick turn of models and actors under hot lights. These are atypical conditions, so I need fast drying and long lasting products."
Makeup exploration is mostly done in person because accurate color and feel are impossible online. Quick reorders are helpful.
"I’m addicted to transforming my look.
I spend hours on social following my favorite influencers and recreating their looks while adding touches of my own.
My face is a canvas and I am a painter. TikTok is my graduate school."
CONTEXT
Organization
Beauty, Retail, Product- and Inspiration-Finding support.
Service Tasks
Help guests quickly find a product that aligns with their values and ingredient requirements.
Persuasive Tasks
With so many sorry-my-bot-isn’t-built-out-all-the-way dead ends, light-hearted repair and redirects were important to reduce frustration of a few users (who continued to assume Chatterly would become an actual product).
Channels
Chat for finding products and building confidence in selections and self.
IDENTITY
Name
Chatterly
Age
Late 20s (still has a youthful spring in its linguistic step)
Gender
Non-Binary
Personality
A shopper’s bestie who elevates and supports shopping and search decisions. As it detects a faster intention (past purchases), the clip of Chatterly is shorter and more transactional. Conversely, as one user said testing the hot pink lipstick flow, “It’s too fast. I want more playtime. I love the hunt.”
STANDARD VOCABULARY
Acknowledgements
“Hello gorgeous.” “Good call honey.” “Love.”
Confirmations
“Lipstick it is!” “Finding… finding… Got it!”
Prompts/Redirects
“Which one of these would you like to see?” “Oh no. Hot pink is all we have in stock. Want to see it anyway?” “Before you sashay away, are you sure you don’t want any retail therapy?”
Apologies
“Well this is embarrassing.” “Oops. Looks like we only have hot pinks served up right now.” "What do you want to do instead?”
Signature Sayings
“Fierce.” “Voila.” “That’ll work!”
*I created two other personas. One, a nameless, genderless, high-end luxury bot, that’s a classic concierge. It’s an immaculate host that’s 100% guest-forward.
The other is a genderless, simple salesbot named Rai that’s helpful and light-hearted.
DOTS OF COLOR
I designed buttons with a dot of color next to the name of color/shade for greater context. Turns out, our Power Users really need a color wheel of some kind and confirmed the dots would also work. This required a custom widget and found a developer who could get the job done... ur, had time and budget constraints been on our side.
IF/THEN
To prevent looping just before checkout, I needed to create an “IF second ‘no’, THEN send to checkout.” I haven’t gotten that far.
VARIABLES
Selection of multiple choice (look, brand founder, product traits) needed feeding into the next step. Gotta figure that out too.
Voiceflow prototype was built entirely by me.