Becoming a senior conversation designer: how to tell when you’ve ✨made✨ it
The baby to senior conversation designer pipeline
Being a conversation designer is absolutely terrifying. Don’t come at me with “Oh, but the discipline has existed for several decades, it just wasn’t called ‘conversation design’ back then. It’s more established now” or “Yeah, but, the work is incredibly rewarding.” Today we’re not talking about the warm fuzzies of conversation design. Today, we’re discussing an all-too familiar insecurity conversation designers have faced in their career: “how do I know when I’m no longer a baby conversation designer?”
In one of my recent articles about conversation design, I shared the unspoken rule of gaining seniority in conversation design, which is: if you’ve been working as a conversation designer for at least a year, then congrats! You’re officially a senior conversation designer. Originally when I wrote that, I thought I was sharing a hot take about the industry, but I was truly surprised to find out that SO MANY conversation designers have lived through the exact same experience. One of the reactions I got was:
You’ve put into words what I’ve been feeling recently about what it’s like to be in this field. Especially the lack of true entry-level positions, and the 1 year transition from junior to senior.
I don’t know about y’all, but time is one of the most unreliable measures of seniority of all time (yes, that was an intentional pun). One year in any design role can vary greatly from company to company depending on their team infrastructure, tech stack, financial backing, etc. It’s more apparent in conversation design when you also factor in the fact that oftentimes peers in the industry don’t even work on the same modality! It can be extremely different to work on written or chat-based experiences than to work on voice or speech-related projects. Working on voice technology can require additional skills of writing “by ear” or knowing how to triage bugs according to where in the NLP pipeline something has gone wrong (e.g. speech recognition bugs are a class on their own).
Okay, so time does not automatically translate into experience, now what? I’d like to think there are other ways of measuring when you’ve finally graduated from junior to senior that does not involve the universal experience of passing through time. As always, I can only write based on what I know and have observed from others, as conversation design still has a long way to go before we can call it an “established” discipline. Please don’t worry if you can’t check off every single point on my list, since, again, all teams and roles are unique and expose you to different things.
For transparency, the goal of this article is not to gatekeep the title of “senior conversation designer”, rather it’s to empower the designer who has a plethora of valuable expertise in conversation design, but is too timid to claim the title of “senior” wholeheartedly. This one’s for you.
What we can learn from Product Design levels
We don’t have to look far to get inspiration about what it means to be senior. Since conversation design is a specialization within the larger field of UX, we can use UX or product design levels as a reference. Generally, the larger the company, the more titles and descriptions there are for each level in design. Usually, the work of a designer can be categorized in 4 key pillars: craft (the day-to-day design output, a.k.a. how good you are at your job), strategy (how forward-thinking you are), collaboration (how many people you interact with), and influence (how you create impact without always “being in the room”, i.e. advocacy).
Within each of these pillars, lies the more familiar job skills you’ve seen before. Under something like “collaboration” you might see “communication”, which is one of the skills can contributes to healthy collaboration but, in itself, is not solely responsible for strong collaboration practices between you and your stakeholders. For example, you might be a great communicator with amazing presentation skills, but if you lack the empathy required to deliver instructions, give feedback, or debate openly with a team member or stakeholder when they are under duress, your working relationship can easily fall apart.
I love Intercom’s product design levels matrix. They really go in-depth as to what it means to hit each competency. In the “communication & feedback” competency, the difference between an associate level and a mid-level designer is the introduction of empathy in communication. An associate-level designer will focus on themself more, making sure they communicate their progress and status to others and regularly ask for feedback on their work. A mid-level designer is expected to do this in addition to making sure what they communicate is understood by the recipient. So they don’t just focus on themselves, instead they will give feedback “in a way people can hear and apply” and they will “be adaptive to how other people work and communicate.” Intercom also makes a point to express that their matrix shouldn’t feel like a checklist, even going as far as to say, “you don’t have to do everything [listed] to get promoted.”
Another good place to check for design level expectations is Figma. The design team at Figma organized and described how each level should perform on Figjam. The nice thing about their approach is that they didn’t only focus on product design, they also included their UX writer role in the mix, which means we can find closer parallels to CxD skills for things like style guidelines and content tooling.
You’re a senior conversation designer when…
No, I won’t make a CxD levels matrix (because it really depends on what the company can nurture or afford), but here are a few examples of what it might sound like to perform as a conversation designer at a senior level. I’ve included as well a couple of more generic career-related experiences that don’t necessary fall under any of the 4 pillars of design (craft, strategy, collaboration, influence).
A senior conversation designer knows:
1. The grass is not always greener 🌱 When I got my first full-time role in conversation design, I assumed working with “old” tech (like IVRs) would make me less competitive and I used to worry that I wouldn’t be able to translate those skills into “newer” tech. This was very much not true! I’ve had no issue looking for senior roles with enterprise IVR experience under my belt. Plus, a lot of what I learned about building for voice back then, I still use in my current job.
For conversation designers in 2023 who are seeing the hype about Generative AI and LLM’s but haven’t been able to use it at work, I know it might feel like you’re missing out, but trust me, you aren’t. Even though other companies might use newer and shinier tech, it doesn’t mean they have the process or infrastructure to match. ChatGPT itself has been commercially available for less than a year, and if you’ve ever worked at a large company, you know that it can take an entire half or even years to add something onto a product roadmap. That means a) not everyone is working with LLM’s — despite what it sounds like on LinkedIn and b) foundations are key. Before you think about influencing output by a large Gen AI system, you should already be comfortable creating or contributing to general chatbot/assistant content style guidelines.
2. Conversational solutions should address real user needs 📊 I literally cannot count the number of times I’ve seen FAQ bots pitched and promoted without being validated in research. This puzzles me: if user research is so highly regarded within the practice of product design, then why is it when a company focuses on shipping a chatbot, they suddenly forget UXR exists?
A senior conversation designer will probably be the first to shoot down a proposed conversational solution if it doesn’t address a user painpoint or provide a new opportunity to the user. Why? Because conversational experiences are built upon probabilistic models. Your team should be really sure the experience translates well into a conversational format before throwing an expensive and (semi) unpredictable solution at it. Conversational AI is not cheap to build or maintain. And it’s not static. Working with AI means being aware that you’re only going to say the right thing maybe 70–80% of the time at scale (because we may not understand the user correctly).
3. Most designs are a compromise 🫂 Confession: sometimes I like looking through beginner conversation designer portfolios because the optimism is so endearing. Wow, a voice bot experience for an airline that doesn’t include a privacy disclaimer? Amazing. The reality is that conversational experiences, like most tech solutions, are built by teams, not only designers. Multiple voices need to carry through into the creation process and sometimes many different kinds of reviews (e.g. privacy, legal, etc) are required. It’s highly unlikely that what you design in the privacy of your own research and thought process will be the final solution— and that’s completely okay!
A senior conversation designer should be comfortable handling feedback from many different kinds of stakeholders. Even without being asked, you should be openly sharing your work as it moves from one design stage to the next. You should also know when to stand your ground versus when to compromise. An example of this might be a deadline: what the engineer can accomplish isn’t what you originally designed, but instead of blocking the launch of the experience or update, you decide to push for the completion of the “full” design as a P0 priority item for the next release.
As Chris Lee wrote in his own Medium article about design seniority, a senior designer recognizes:
[D]esign is a cost the business is bearing to achieve a specific goal (make the product more desirable). If there is any way he/she can achieve that goal with as little design as possible, then the team should do that!
4. The best design artifact is the one that is accessible and understood 💡 I’ve seen a lot of designers discuss at length over which kind of design artifact (e.g. flowchart, sample dialog, etc) is the most effective per context or goal, but ultimately, the best artifact is the one that works for your team. After all, they’re the ones who will need to open the file and navigate your designs! Your work should be concise and easy to understand for your target audience, and it should cater to their sensibilities. What works well for one audience will not always carry over for a different audience. I’m not just talking about catering your handoff presentation to a client vs. your team members. This is also true when you’re presenting to peers vs. to a group of executives (the latter might prefer short, impact-style conversations than wasting time in details).
A senior conversation designer will usually try to extract this information (communication style preferences) early on from their stakeholder. This may come in the form of asking them directly if they have any artifact or handoff preferences or asking them what has worked or hasn’t worked in previous design projects. You might also try to meet with people who have collaborated with them before and ask what worked best with this person.
5. Keep a CxD one-pager in your back pocket 👖 I don’t mean to say you literally need to write up a one-pager about what conversation design is and what your team’s best practices are, but it’s always a good idea to establish a home where stakeholders can learn more about your conversation design pattern library or general CxD interaction guidelines.
A large part of the job of conversation design revolves advocacy and being able to explain to new partners what value you bring to the work. A senior conversation designer knows not everyone on a given project will have partnered with a conversation designer before, so they will tend to over-communicate the CxD perspective, increase their visibility, and try to foster understanding about their discipline before they’re dropped from important product decision meetings.
6. All writing is one piece in a larger system 📝 Similar to having a home for your interaction guidelines, you should also have a home for your chatbot/assistant copywriting guidelines. At the end of the day, your user will not care who the author of your copy is, they will only care that it makes sense and sounds consistent across experiences. They don’t want their chatbot to suddenly malfunction with an identity crisis while they’re trying to get an issue resolved.
A senior conversation designer largely contributes to or creates these bot personality and content systems, knowing also when to break the rules or add friction to a given experience. For this reason, a senior conversation designer will typically bring all copy in front of design peers (if available) or key stakeholders for feedback. This is to ensure two things: that all writing is reviewed by more than one person and that partners are aware of any new copy being added to the conversational product.
7. Design is a marathon not a sprint 👟 When you’re a baby conversation designer, it’s easy to look at your work as a series of sprints. You update some bot copy here or you review conversation analytics there. It might not always be easy or time-effective to look at how your work ladders up into the broader Conversational AI strategy.
The role of a senior conversation designer is to look beyond the day-to-day requirements and evaluate the UX of their experience holistically, flagging where there are issues or which features may need to be added. This means contributing to their company’s roadmap and influencing where resources should be allocated for upcoming projects.
8. Not all tech approaches are ethical 😈 Simply because something is possible with modern technology does not always mean it’s beneficial or desirable for the user. It’s easy to fall into the trap of over-automating an experience for convenience. Conversation designers should also be questioning whether certain integrations are necessary in the first place.
For example, modern IVR systems can extract where a user is calling from, without needing to ask them to confirm their location. However, to an end user, this approach might feel creepy, and might cause them to distrust the system if it isn’t upfront with what data is being collected from them. A senior conversation designer will look to find a balance between “what we can do” and “what we should do”.
9. Be pickier with your sources 📚 When you are starting out as a conversation designer, the best advice is always to learn and read as much as possible from everything and everyone in the field. This is so you can find patterns in industry knowledge and start to form your own opinions. At the beginning, it might just sound like you’re regurgitating someone else’s perspective, but the more you follow and watch other industry leaders, the more those words start to make sense and become your own, particularly after you’ve applied them into your work.
When you’re a senior conversation designer, this firehose approach no longer works. You should be protective of your own learned experience by only following sources or voices that are relevant to you or are trustworthy and verified as being helpful by other conversation designers. Just because someone has a platform, doesn’t mean they will have something meaningful to say. This is especially true in conversation design. This particular niche community is incredibly welcoming and kind! Unfortunately, the side effect of this is that few people will hold thought leaders accountable and call out when sources are clickbait or not backed by (recent) expertise and data.
10. Conversational products aren’t new 🧳 For better or for worse, most users today will have already experienced a conversational solution. This experience, regardless of good or bad, is baggage they carry with them through their life to measure all subsequent experiences against. In a 2017 LivePerson quantitative study, it was reported that, “Over half of consumers globally, 56%, reported still preferring to speak with a human instead of getting assistance from a chatbot.” Working as a conversation designer means fighting the uphill battle of changing or improving your user’s perception of Conversational AI solutions.
It also means knowing that your experience is constantly being evaluated by your users. A senior conversation designer will focus on allowing users to speak in a natural conversational way or, if that is not possible (given the tech stack), resolving quirks so that users still know how to navigate the experience and say what’s required to fulfill their task. To do this, it’s important that the senior conversation designer understands the abilities and limitations of the system they are building upon. It’s not about being “technical” and learning to code. Instead, it’s about knowing if the model has any biases you need to work with, if your integration requires formatting data in a specific structured way, if your system has an autocorrect feature that makes it more forgiving of user typos, etc.
Other important senior CxD milestones
The following is a list of honorable mentions in the career of a conversation designer. If you’ve hit any of these, celebrate them! It’s called a milestone for a reason!
- You’ve seen one of your designs go live 🎉
- You’ve conducted or watched your design go through WoZ testing 🎉
- You’ve delegated some of your original functions to a new team member (UXR, content design, QA, etc) 🎉
- You’ve onboarded a new conversation designer onto your team 🎉
- You’ve contributed a new line item to or created CxD documentation from scratch 🎉
- You’ve helped your team outline metrics to define project success 🎉
- [Rare] You’ve taken your work to design crit 🎉
- [Rare] You’ve helped your team switch tools/platforms 🎉
- You’ve been called a content designer (a true CxD canon event) 🫠
Final Thoughts
This article originally started out as a spontaneous Instagram post where I quickly realized I had more thoughts on this topic than the character count allowed. To all my fellow conversation designers out there: I see you, appreciate you, and truly wish you the best on your CxD journey.
About the author
Elaine Anzaldo is a seasoned Conversation Designer, having worked on voice technologies at companies such as Meta, NLX, Apple, and SRI International. As a designer for both influential voice assistants and the customer self-service industry, she has created natural conversational artifacts for voice, chat, and multimodal interfaces.
