Claudia Francesca Mueller: Sharing Content Guidance with an AI Chatbot – Episode 7

Claudia Francesca Mueller At Trusted Shops, Claudia Francesca Mueller and her colleagues have built an AI-powered chatbot called Piuma that lets non-writers access content guidance through a natural-language interface. It took just a few weeks to launch the initial version of Piuma, building the chat interface with Voiceflow and using the LangChain development framework to access both their content design guidance and OpenAI's API. Even though the chatbot's functionality matched their users' expectations almost perfectly, they still find that they have to constantly collaborate with their partners to fully understand their needs and communicate the benefits of the product. We talked about: her work as a content design and localization lead at Trusted Shops Piuma, the AI chatbot they have built at Trusted Shops how Piuma arose from research and discovery work they did around how to best share their content-design guidance how they developed Piuma using Voiceflow with guidance from a conversational design expert the learning curve around incorporating LLMs into a chatbot like Piuma how they decided which parts of their voice and tone guidance to include in the chatbot how Voiceflow works with the OpenAI and Langchain the need to sometimes adjust the source documentation that the LLM is consulting to get the answers you want in the chatbot how her multilingual background helps her understand computer languages the challenges of getting designers to adopt a new tool like Piuma her ongoing communication with designers to understand their needs and how to address them how she balances evangelism and outreach with collaboration around improving Piuma the tendency of humans to stay with familiar patterns and routines Claudia's bio Claudia Francesca Mueller is a multilingual content designer living in Amsterdam. She speaks Swiss-German, Italian, German, English and Dutch daily, and feels at home when languages are mixed up in one sentence. That’s how she has also learned to bridge culture gaps with style and the right tone. Her love for languages, words, culture, shapes and colours brought her to content design. A discipline that became her passion and that she loves to live as an expert, leader and coach. Her background and career in multiple content roles have strongly shaped her thinking. She believes content is a holistic discipline where words are only one of many tools to convey a message. Currently, Claudia works at Trusted Shops as Principal Content Design and Localization. Connect with Claudia online LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43688rk97rc Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 7. On any one digital product team, there are never enough content designers or UX writers. So when interaction designers or engineers have to write interface copy, they typically have to consult content-design documentation. AI creates new ways to share this kind of content guidance. At Trusted Shops, Claudia Francesca Mueller and her colleagues have built an AI-powered chatbot that lets non-writers access content guidance through a natural-language interface. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number seven of the Content and AI podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Claudia Francesca Mueller. Claudia is a multilingual content designer and a localization lead at Trusted Shops. Welcome, Claudia. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're doing these days. Claudia: Hi, everybody. Thanks a lot for having me, Larry. As you said, I'm a content design and localization lead at Trusted Shops. Trusted Shops, for the ones that don't know what Trusted Shops is, it is a German e-commerce software as a service company. We certify shops. And if you're a trustworthy shop, you will get a badge and you can start collecting reviews. We offer a review system management to the customers or shop owners. And for the consumers, we offer a buyer protection. And I'm part of a UX team at Trusted Shops. We are seven designers at the moment. And in the content localization team, we're five people. Claudia: Together, I do the math, we're around 13, 14, 15 people in the UX team. And I'm responsible for the content design craft at Trusted Shops. I jump into, let's say, projects that have a high impact on business, but I am also responsible to develop the craft. That means helping others in the team to write UX copy. One of the things that actually was part of this lately was developing a UX writing body called Piuma. That was one of the projects I worked on it this year. I can tell how we came actually to build Piuma the chatbot. Larry: That's why I wanted to have you on. And also, something you just said, we talked about this a little bit before we went on the air, but your official title is principal content designer at Trusted Shops. And I think what you just described is a classic principle role that, "Hey, there's this new thing. Got to do it. Somebody super experienced has to take this on." I just wanted to get that back in there because it sounds like you're genuinely doing principal-level work. But I'd love to hear the origin story of Piuma, especially the name. Claudia: Piuma is my cat. And she's always here in my home office. And when we started working on this project, and I worked together with a lovely technical writer in our team, I said, "Well, we need a name." And he said, "Well, we just call it like your cat, Piuma." And I was like, "Yeah, that's a good one because I really love Piuma and she's always here." That's how we actually got a name for the project, but also for the chatbot. And the whole idea of this chatbot ... Well, I have to go back in time a little bit because when I started Trusted Shops, we were talking about consistency. There was no consistency. There were a lot of voices, casual, funny. You could see whatever you wanted to see just in our content, in our UI. We thought, "Well, we need consistency, so let's develop a voice and tone guideline." Claudia: And that's also what we did. But after just doing all this work that actually took a year because, as I said, I have other tasks, that was just side project, we implemented those, so this voice and tone guideline, in the design system, in the existing design system, so we could call it content and design system. Also, actually for advocacy reasons, of course, when it comes to content design. The next step was like, okay, so now we have this documentation, but it's just a documentation, so how do we get people using this documentation? Because we all know it's not really attractive to have a documentation lying somewhere. And people just forget about it. How can you do that that just designers that actually are busy mostly with other things, more the visuals, how can we get them using this documentation? We thought about a lot of different softwares and we involved the designers as well in this process. Claudia: We thought about Ditto and Frontitude. And somehow, all of these softwares were not convincing. Designers were like, "Yeah, we don't know. It seems like a lot of work." And so we were like, "Okay, so if this software are not the solution or are not actually what you need in your daily life on your daily work, let's find something that works for you." We did a survey and we did research with the designers and OpenAI came up. One of designers just said literally, "Wow, it would be so great to just have a plugin in Figma and we can just ChatGPT." And then I was like, "Hmm." And then at the same time, I saw somebody from Expedia that was posting on LinkedIn about a chatbot. And I was like, "Okay." I just combined ... I was just making the connection. Just have our documentation as a knowledge base and data that we can use actually for the chatbot and we build a chatbot in Figma. Claudia: That's actually how this whole idea started on this project. And everybody was like, "Oh, yeah, that's such a great idea. Let's do this." Of course, there was missing knowledge in this whole project that I couldn't fill because I've never worked ... I've never built a chatbot. I know OpenAI, yes. I slightly knew what the LLM is, but how do we connect this data? How do we get a chatbot, the user interface? We needed an expert. And luckily enough, I had one at hand here in the Netherlands and a conversational designer expert. And so we asked her, "Would you be interested to help us for this project?" And she was like, "Oh, yeah, that's such an interesting project. I really want to help you." And so we hired her and she helped us with the first MVP and the concept of talk to your style guide. Claudia: And so she recommended to use Voiceflow. That's one of the programs out there. It's a commercial program, of course. Platform that you can use and that you actually ... It's actually really accessible because you're going to work especially on the conversational flow with blocks. And it's really intuitive, so it's easy actually to ... I would say for content designers that are not really technical yet, that you just work on the conversation, let's say. And of course, there's prompt engineering involved because you have to tell, let's say, the LLM and the whole data what it has to do, that you get the answer you want. But still, for starting up with conversation AI, I think, and building a chatbot, it's a great program. We started working on that together also with a technical writer that helped me with the data. It's really easy. Claudia: You just upload a file or website. It's like the most easy you can think of. And then you're just busy actually with the conversation. And of course, when you start working with it, you get curious because you want to know how it works because if you know how it works,