Now that we know the purpose of chatbots and voicebots, it can help us to understand the fundamentals of one of the most common mistakes made by chat designers and developers, which eventually leads to all other mistakes: developing conversational UI based on their application's GUI.

A bot's experience should not imitate your web/app experience; it should mimic your agent, which is your service provider – a human!

Rather than leveraging voice and conversational capabilities by replicating real-world interactions, many bot developers and designers try to imitate the behavior of previous human-computer UIs and, more specifically, those of digital channels, such as websites/mobile apps. Instead of building a voice UX that reflects the conversations we generally have with our banker or our travel agent, developers force conversational UIs to imitate bank mobile apps or websites.

Figure 1: Don't replicate the web experience

A successful conversational UI will bring the human to the bot. Try to think what your phone call/store interaction would be like with a human and bring it to life in your chat/voice application.