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Nilofar Shamim Haja
I am a digital marketing, content management and communications professional with 14+ years of experience. Currently a conversation designer, content and marketing lead with Nivi, Inc.
Location Delhi, India
Activity
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The limitations on using apostrophe is just an issue on the Glitch platform. If you use another third party application to build and deploy a chatbot, you can use all kinds of language syntax.
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
I am so glad I took this course, it's unlike any other online course I have participated in! Immersive, rigorous, full of learning curves, and a great community of active, mature and positive participants providing support and feedback through the month.
Even though I am a full-time conversation designer and work on usability testing and stakeholder...
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@KathrynJ So cool! Love how detailed this is.
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
I feel so proud and thrilled to have been able to understand html code on the Glitch template and create a chatbot prototype!
There's plenty of room for improvement and razzle-dazzle, but here's what I have so far: https://nutribot-recipe.glitch.me -- Choose the Recipes --> Veggies option!
NutriBot is a 24x7 guidebot providing nutritious recipes and...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
The video is great in providing step by step guidance on editing the index.html code and adding our script to create the conversation. It would help to understand the logic of WHY conversations are built in this form/structure before proceeding to edit on Glitch. For example, the "keyword" serves a dual purpose: directing the human to choose an option in the...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
Okay, slowly getting the hang of editing text within the html code on Glitch. I didn't realize that I had to click on the buttons (human response on the right bar) for the bot response to show up. I managed to increase the "text bubble" size, remove the purple circular icon in the header, and add my own GIF link to the script. Would like to understand how to...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
I am super excited and thrilled to have the chance to learn basic coding <3
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
I found this video guide to designing a prototype using PowerPoint super cool! The designer broke down each step of the user journey in actions (sort of like our storyboard) and then augmented that by sketching each action as a screen that the user would interact with http://keynotopia.com/guides-ppt/
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
It's interesting that in the duration of this course, we have single-handedly done what normally is a team initiative - chatbot idea, stakeholder research and feedback, persona mapping, conversation script, user testing - kudos to all of us for making it to Week 4!
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
Week 3 has been the most demanding and the most fulfilling week so far in terms of the learning curve we had to skate on and the nuts-and-bolts we had to tinker with! I think about what we learned in the first day of Week 3 - that we need to keep the bot as botlike as possible and not humanize it. However, when we have to embody the 'bot' and write a...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
NutriBot - a 24x7 guidebot for expectant mothers to access health meal plans, delicious recipes and browse through food recommendations by nutritionists and the mom community!
Here's the link to my Whimsical board:
https://whimsical.com/EizpvW5RP3XuyHmFJ9dWPsHad to exercise my brain muscles a bit to get the connectors working as needed. Also, where...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
Would love to get feedback on the conversation script I wrote between my chatbot 'NutriBot' and user Kaya.
NutriBot is a guidebot for healthy, nutritious recipes and meal plans for expectant (pregnant) mothers, curated by expert nutritionists and vouched by the community of moms. Kaya is a 26-year-old woman from Mumbai, India, who is looking for such...
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NutriBot is a 24x7 chat and voice bot guide to nutritious recipes, healthy meal plans, and delicious food inspiration for expectant mothers.
“NutriBot is a friendly, informative, and helpful bot that’s eager to help expectant mothers plan your nutritional requirements! You can browse or listen to 100s of recipes from all regions of India (and international...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
The Scene: 26-year-old Kaya is 6 weeks pregnant. She lives in Mumbai, India with her husband Rahul. They have just returned from their first visit to the gynac, who has advised the couple on care to be taken, particularly in terms of diet and what to avoid. Kaya and Rahul are both foodies and enjoy cooking as well as eating out. But they hadn't given much...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
This was the quick and fun version of UX storyboarding! What's left to our imagination is how Silver finds out about Boo - Facebook ad, a best friend's recommendation, a school counselor puts up a poster highlighting Boo on the notice board? - and the critical steps in navigation: signing in, accepting user terms, data protection and privacy, is Silver old...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
I am conflicted about my experience chatting with F'xa. I didn't know how to pronounce the bot's name, the navigation options were constrained and the conversation or learning itself was limited to what F'xa scripted.
If we zoom out of this discussion about feminist frameworks of designing conversations for a chatbot and actually explore how each of us...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
It's also really important that we don't block/shame/dismiss users that are being malicious and abusive with chatbots on the tech platforms where such interactions take place. These are conditioned behaviors. We need to spend time and resources in unpacking their responses and behavior. We need to nudge both women and men to question why they would resort to...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
As a conversation designer working for a health-tech company with our in-house chatbot, I had to do a lot of user research to understand people's expectations from a chatbot and what were their expectations when interacting with one (stakeholders: 18-40, women, men, India).
People were familiar with "automated messages" and IVR (mobile, ticketing, ordering...
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Some wonderful perspectives on feminist design frameworks shared in the comments below and I agree with all of them! A feminist design intervention would mean a product, app, website, or conversation that is inclusive right from the concept to the actual prototype, user testing, launch, feedback, and iteration phases.
In ICT accessibility for persons with...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
We kind of take it for granted that everyone who has a mobile phone would be quick to understand what bots are, but we live in plural realities. One of the challenges of creating conversational chatbots for emerging economies like India is that not everyone is able to engage, understand or fully adopt chatting with a "bot".
To educate the audience about...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
It's very important to manage user expectations at the outset. Let people know that they are chatting with a bot, not a human agent, and so the boundaries of interaction and expectations will automatically be limited. However, even within these constraints, the bot can provide help on various topics and in different situations.
Secondly, give users basic...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
At the healthtech company I work for as a conversation designer, I have been writing conversations for our chatbot for close to a year now. The framework was always focused on making conversations friendly, engaging, interactive, non-judgmental, bite-sized and easy to follow... and so on, but the approach was never from a feminist perspective. So I am really...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
As in life when we state our goals and the steps necessary to achieve them, so in product or chatbot design, we need to focus on the specifics. Sometimes, designers are so caught up/in love with their "concepts" that they fail to test its viability in real life. In the course of listing down the stakeholders, their strengths and needs, barriers and how the...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
Diet Chatbot for Pregnant Women & New Mothers
Let medical experts, nutritionists and the community guide you to healthy, nutritious meals during pregnancy and in the first 2 years after your baby's delivery
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
In this exercise, I realized that I might not have all the perspective needed to design a chatbot for my stakeholders: pregnant women and new mothers looking for information on diet, nutrition and healthy food. There will be cultural differences in what constitutes healthy food for pregnant women (especially in a country as diverse as India). Second, there are...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
How could a chatbot help pregnant women and new mothers get information on nutrition, diet and what food to eat during pregnancy and for the first 2 years after delivery.
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
I came to know about personas and user research when I started work as a conversation designer for a chatbot at a health-tech company last year. Our chatbot provides information on contraceptives, birth control methods and family planning to women and men in India and Kenya. The process began with reaching out to a bunch of people in different cities (age,...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
These are great markers to use as a framework! The parameters are also broad enough to cover the ideation (conceptual), design, usability (prototype and user testing), launch (proof of concept), and review stages of bot building and conversation design. I think the most important stage is drawing up a list of your stakeholders and their needs.
An...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
This reminds me of my interaction with Alexa at home. When I want to select a TV program, I will always say, "Hey Alexa, show me Stranger Things'. My boyfriend finds this quite funny and remarks that I don't have to take Alexa's name every time: "it's a voice-activated AI, just press the mic button". My response: Yeah, I am treating Alexa with respect when I...
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For chatbot design and conversations to be more inclusive and accessible to users of all abilities and stakeholders, it's important that not just the design and tech teams participate in the feminist chatbot design process, but different representatives have a stake in the process - CEO/C-suite, marketing and sales professionals, interface designers, human...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
It would be really interesting to learn if there are feminist pedagogies of learning and teaching, this course for instance, 'Designing a Feminist Chatbot,' was it designed from a feminist perspective? How was this course promoted on social media (audience targeting, marketing campaign)? Also, equally interested to know how many men participated in this...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
I particularly notice this in video and console games. The 'hero' or protagonist of most games on PlayStation are white, able-bodied males. Women play supporting roles and sometimes not even that.
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
Week 2 has been an invigorating journey through time! We have come a long way in our understanding and acknowledgement of systemic oppression against women (and men). There has been progress in so many areas (right to vote, education), but in many others the status quo remains the same (female infanticide, child marriage, right to own property, right to sexual...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
I am super excited to begin Week 2! Already thinking about the chatbot I want to design and who my stakeholders will be.
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
Really good examples to gauge whether these instances are allocation or representational harm. But taking a step back, it's fundamentally problematic that we have transitioned to labelling these as errors in the AI system and externalized it rather than frame this as an internal, human problem. It's ultimately human bias in play, AI or no AI.
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
As a conversational chatbot designer, one of the earliest biases I saw within my own approach is in the use of language and emojis while writing scripted conversations. When I wanted to write about being strong and healthy in relation to a health topic, I would use the flexed biceps emoji - an inherently male reference to strength or power, right? But this...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
"The more you chat with Tay, the smarter it gets," said Microsoft about the AI chatbot. Smart doesn't mean empathetic, kind, innocent, nuanced, incisive, or insightful, right? Smart, within the parameters of training a chatbot, means it processes human communications and detects an intent. The intent is subjective - good, bad, and so on. So, the question about...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
Giving the chatbot a female persona is not the issue, the problem arises when that chatbot is deployed solely in gender-stereotyped roles, industries or situations (as a voice assistant at home, in a grocery app, as a nurse bot in a healthcare company, or in an airline app as a ticketing agent, reinforcing a bias that these are jobs most suited for women)....
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
I am a conversation designer for a healthcare technology company, so I was already aware about the difference between scripted chatbots (I write the scripts, afterall) and NLP-enabled chatbots (our company is getting there, we are currently in the AI training phase, pouring through data).
It's important that conversation designers prioritize user testing...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
I interact with chatbots on a weekly basis, through banking, healthcare, food and grocery, and other related services. I know these are chatbots because it announces upfront that it is an automated agent and not a human/live agent.
The most common points of frustration in interacting with chatbots are its inability to detect intent, error responses that...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
I would recommend Wysa mental health app. It's designed to be friendly, empathetic, and intuitive in its interaction with users and offers support across a spectrum of emotional behavior and moods. This section also made me think of all the "bad" bots that we interact with - bots deployed by bank and financial institutions, airlines, telecom operators, for...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
I am a conversation designer at a healthcare technology company and I am responsible for writing the script for our chatbot that delivers information and guidance to women and men seeking health-related information. In the course of researching the market for existing health chatbots and their conversation templates, you begin to notice the structural biases...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
One of the things that helps me reflect and retain what I have learned is to share insights and key takeaways with colleagues and then prompt them for their thoughts on the topics. These insights could be tied to ongoing projects, partnerships, campaigns, company vision or even a news or innovation. It reinforces insights and makes obvious practical...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
Defining goals and brainstorming ideas is one of the most difficult stages in user experience design! To cull out all the possibilities and desiral "concepts" and bring it down to what's most tenable and sustainable as per user needs as well as the business goals is a tough process.
An important lesson for companies to emulate is to never look at the...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
I handle digital marketing at the healthcare technology company I work with and one of the things we do user testing for are Facebook ads! This is quite often a neglected area. Digital marketers and social media managers quite often are so in love with their own ideas that they invest time or plan on testing how the audience will engage with the digital assets...
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That's a great question, Joanna! One approach would be to ideate a personal project and have defined outcomes or goals.
For example, you may want to set up an Instagram account for your hobbies (photography, embroidery, woodwork, collecting stamps) or you may be interested in launching a newsletter on a specific topic, or even start an online workshop or...
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Nilofar Shamim Haja made a comment
Week 1 of UX Foundation course has been a good refresher for me. I am a conversation designer for a healthcare technology company that leverages an AI-enabled chatbot to empower men and women to make health decisions. User experience design is at the heart of our mobile chat service.
The main advantage of having a user-centred approach to product design is...
