Work
UX, interaction design, copywriting, content guidance.
Got Tax Questions? Just Ask Alex - the ATO's Chatbot
In response to the 2020 lockdown, the Australian Tax Office (ATO) faced a surge in requests for tax relief, information, and income support. This led to overwhelming phone, email, and live chat traffic. To address this, I collaborated with the ATO to enhance their chatbot, Alex, improving both user interaction and content delivery to better serve millions of Australians.
Diagnosing the Problem:
Through usability testing, heuristic reviews, and analytics analysis, we identified several key challenges:
- Low Engagement: Despite proactive deployment on high-traffic pages, Alex had a low engagement rate of only 5% due to unhelpful initial information.
- Confusing Responses: Alex's content was poorly structured and lacked clear next steps.
- Subpar Interaction Design: Users could only interact via a text entry field, causing choice paralysis.
- Text Heavy: Responses were long and lacked visual aids, making them difficult to digest.
Recommendations:
We provided over 40 recommendations to enhance the interface, website, and chatbot conversations. Major improvements included:
- Flexible Interaction Options: Allowing users to type or choose from suggested options facilitated natural interactions and presented clear next steps, maintaining conversational flow.
- Natural Language Communication: Simplifying complex tax information to be easily understood. Key principles included:
- Clarifying Intent: Ensuring responses were specific rather than generic, often by offering follow-up questions.
- Direct Answers: Placing short answers at the beginning of responses.
- Explain Like I’m 5: Using examples or definitions for technical terms or complex concepts.
- Minimal Legalese: Keeping non-critical information in website content with links rather than cluttering chatbot responses.
- Feedback Mechanisms: Implementing a cycle of delivering, testing, and adapting to continually improve the chatbot.
We created new conversation flows specifically for COVID-19 related content and introduced post-conversation flows to track effectiveness, significantly enhancing user satisfaction and engagement.
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