HGTV's Hazel Design Tips - including; UX, personality design and serving up quality content in your experience

Facebook Business

November 7, 2017

Creating an engaging experience that serves up relevant content to different users can be complex; however, this is exactly what HGTV succeeded in doing with their bot, 'Hazel.' HGTV wanted to easily engage their customers with a unique voice and tone while giving them the content they are looking for. Let's take a look at two aspects of Hazel to see what we can learn from their building process.

LEARNING 1

Personality Design: Making your experience unique

Early on, HGTV knew from testing with their customers that Hazel needed to be useful in serving up the inspiration and content that their audience has grown accustomed to, but also have a fun side. They created a 'personality guide' that everyone who writes for Hazel refers to. The guide is a 2 - 3 page document that lays out 4 main aspects of Hazel's personality:

• Tone: "Slightly more put-together than you might feel, but not annoying about it"
• Personality Traits: "She loves classic style but also likes to take risks"
• Turns of Phrase: “I'm kind of obsessed with..."
• Opinions: “Obsessed with farm tables, and mason jars...”

Built-in NLP - use built-in NLP to bring personality to life.

LEARNING 2

UX Design: Focusing on simplicity

HGTV designed Hazel to serve up quality images and content in response to user inquiries. To accomplish this they focused on simple, yet useful UX design. As soon as a user interacts with Hazel, select images are served up and design advice including recent trends or articles, and if you inquire with specifics, like 'farmhouse' design trends, you'll receive even more in-depth guidance.

Onboarding experience:

User inquires about 'farmhouse' inspiration:

UX features used:

• Message Media Templates - serves images, GIFs, or video as structured messages with an optional button to respond.
• Webview - enables a webpage to load inside of the conversation.
• Quick replies - allows the user to select even more specific content, such as 'black and white' in the options above.
• Persistent Menu - gives the user the ability to control and edit their communications preferences. Notice how Hazel serves up 'Decorate a room' (in the image below) as a main call-to-action in their persistent menu. This is a great indicator that HGTV knew what CTA their audience normally looks for, so they included it in their menu.

Key Takeaways

HGTV has experienced success with Hazel. The team set appropriate, streamlined goals paired with a simple UX, fun personality, and mirroring what their audience already loved. This team-driven experience design, is what has driven high engagement and adoption of Hazel.

Don't forget to review our experience building best practices > Click here to get the guide!

We'd love to hear your thoughts about Hazel or building your own unique experience! Head over to our Messenger Developer's Group and drop us a line.

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