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Platzhalter

Remstal Contact

a chatbot for the Remstal Gartenschau 2019
Platzhalter

In cooperation with the Remstal Gartenschau and Unified Inbox, we were allowed to help to develop questions for the ChatBot, which will later help visitors find their way around the grounds later at the Gartenschau in the summer of 2019.

Platzhalter
About the "Gartenschau"

The Remstal Gartenschau 2019 is the first garden show that stretches over an area of 80km. This also makes it the first horticultural show that also takes place in areas that are free of charge and open to the public. There should be, in addition to the usual attractions, a bike rental, various events and concerts.

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Project Idea

In the course of these many innovations, a new version of the telephone hotline is also to be set up – the RemstalKontakt.

In the RemstalKontakt project, the well-known telephone hotline is to be discontinued and automated instead.
For this purpose, a chatbot was programmed in cooperation with Unified Inbox. Garden show visitors should be able to scan QR codes that are published with the advertising. Through the QR code, a WhatsApp chat is automatically started, through which the visitors can write their questions or send them as a voice memo.

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About "UIB"

Unified Inbox is a company that specializes in the development of chatbots. For example, they have already developed systems that can be used to simply let coffee out of the vending machine via WhatsApp.

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Concept

The questions that visitors to the garden show ask the chatbot are filtered, analyzed and answered by an artificial intelligence (AI).
For this purpose, the news is examined for keywords. Depending on the question, the AI then accesses a specific database and provides the visitor with the corresponding answers. Possible answers include texts, images and links to various websites where visitors can navigate or buy tickets to events, for example.

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Our Role

Our role in this project was to assist the two batches of the project, help them work out the questions visitors would have and then investigate how a bot like this would be most likely to be received by visitors.

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Synthesis

In order to figure out what the questions would be that visitors would ask at the garden show, we first started by looking at statistics from past garden shows. Among other things, we found out who the typical garden show visitors are, what they do there, and how many people visit the state garden show on average.

From this information, we created our personas and user journeys. We then went through these point by point and worked out the different touchpoints and resulting questions that each visitor would have with the garden show.

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Testing

After the development of the questions was completed, we started to test how and if the visitors would communicate with the chatbot.

However, we quickly found out that the biggest problem in this project was not the usability of the bot, but the conviction to use it.

So we started to test how we could minimize the barrier that prevents visitors from interacting with the chatbot.

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Testing

However, our tests all unfortunately revealed that it was difficult to get users to scan QR codes at the time. Many didn't know how to do it and were afraid of the associated costs.

Apart from that, there were also problems on the part of Unified Chatbot, which limited the possible questions that could have been answered by the chatbot to ten, which is why the garden show ultimately ended this project. The Remstal Garden Show was carried out in 2019 without a chatbot.

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Project Info
Team

Jan Keller

Vanessa Stöckel

Subject

Focus Areas 1

Semester 4

SS 2017/2017

My Part

(User) Research

Regular meetings with the cooperation partners

Synthesis

Conception

Visual Design