Onboarding Conversations: Ceba Chatbot
🧭 Overview
As part of CommBank’s digital assistant offering, I led the strategy and design of a rich content framework for Ceba, the bank’s conversational AI assistant. The aim was to improve onboarding, discoverability, and task success through a content system that supports more complex user intents while maintaining a seamless, humanised experience.
We introduced rich content cards, conversation scaffolding, and animation concepts — all designed to increase engagement, clarify intent, and build trust in the chatbot experience from the first interaction.
🎯 Goals
Help users understand who or what Ceba is and set clear expectations.
Design a scalable onboarding experience that is engaging, instructive, and non-intrusive.
Reduce support calls by increasing user confidence in self-service tasks.
Build a card-based content system to support varied task types and intents across multiple touchpoints.
🔍 Research & Strategy
We identified key issues early on:
Customers were confused or frustrated when they realised Ceba was a bot.
There was no clear intro or onboarding experience.
Complex queries were failing due to limited visual support and messaging clarity.
To address this, I ran workshops to explore emotion-driven behaviour, associative priming, and strategies to reduce cognitive load.
Key themes included:
Aesthetics and first impressions matter
Visual content supports trust and task efficiency
One clear call to action per screen increases focus
✍️ Design Process
Activities included:
Co-creation sessions with stakeholders
Rich content card matrix (informative, visual, task-based)
Design of modular card structures and templates
Animated onboarding flows (2 variants tested)
UX flows for new and returning users
Copywriting, message concepts, and tone of voice guidance
UX handoff for TMC flow and onboarding journey
🖼 Solution Highlights
Rich content cards: Designed to support a range of interactions — from FAQs to transactional flows — using image, copy, and buttons.
Animation onboarding flows: Created two sequences to test attention, memory, and emotional tone in early engagement. Prototyped using Framer, tested and implemented.
Onboarding strategy: Set a clear path for introducing Ceba, setting expectations, and easing users into conversation (e.g. “I’m not a human but I’m very clever and available 24/7”).
Scalable card system: Designed to work across mobile, web, and future conversational contexts.
✅ Outcomes
Increased clarity for first-time users
More consistent onboarding experience across customer segments
A scalable design framework adopted by broader teams
Embedded into Ceba’s long-term roadmap for complex conversation handling