Meet Erica
Erica is Bank of America’s AI platform. Rather than integrate with a 3rd party system, we were tasked with creating the product from the ground up to build a platform tailored to Bank customers.
The problem
When we started this effort, other virtual assistants (e.g., Alexa, Siri) were just starting to take off. People were starting to embrace a concierge approach to tasks that used to require more effort on their part. Instead of getting up to turn on a light, they could tell Alexa to do it. Instead of pulling up playlists on their phones, they could just ask Siri to do it.
Our challenge was to adapt this paradigm to banking.
The audience
Technically we were creating this for all Bank customers which covers an enormous range of personas. However, unlike many projects where we had personas categorized by asset level or age, here we kept our attention on clients most likely to be tech savvy, early adopters.
My role
My role was to build a UX team to focus entirely on AI, oversee all of the interaction design, visuals, editorial, and to partner with our LOB and tech teams to define an overall process. And with a team as lean as ours, I was also jumping in do hands on design and editorial when needed.
Our approach
Because we’d never designed for AI before, and there was little documentation at the time about the best practices, we pretty much built the process as we went along.
Visual explorations
We mapped out a list of elements that would be needed for a conversational platform. In addition to standard elements such as color palette, tables, lists and buttons, we’d need unique things such as sound waves, microphone states, conversation bubbles.
And so, we began exploring.
Here are some examples of the components that ultimately defined Erica’s conversational style.
Wireframes & flows
The wires could be fairly templated for Erica but the focus was really on the conversational flow. Erica had to be able to both prompt and respond to each intent.
Conversational content
This may be where Erica different most from our typical digital projects. In other projects, we only had to think in terms of sentences, paragraphs, tone and style. Here, we had to break that down into intents, potential user utterances, verbal responses, responses on glass, mapping codes, transitional words, etc.
To do this, we set up a content matrix where we wrote, edited and maintained all content-related detail. Additionally, we partnered with our brand team to create guidelines to expand upon the brand tone of voice guidelines.
This may look daunting for copywriters but it was the most effective way to manage the variety of content categories for Erica.
The results
