Whether you’re building a full buttons flow or a fluid conversation experience you will soon find yourself in need to ask your user a very specific question.
What is your age? What is your email? What is your customer code? All these questions (and more) can be asked by using Xenioo input actions. In this post, we will be looking at the Generic Input Action, the base of all input actions.
Using the action
To add the Generic Input Action to your chatbot just click on the interaction you need and, using the gear icon, select “Add New Action”. Move to the Input section of the Available Actions Dialog and select the Generic Input action.
Done! You’ve just added a question step! Now just move down to the Go To action that Xenioo automatically added and choose where the flow should go after the question is answered.
What is a blocking input?
A blocking input will hold the user on that spot of the conversation until the question is replied. Unless differently configured, our action will not let the user move forward in our flow until the question is answered.
Giving up on the question
By default a question cannot be skipped by your user but it may be a good design approach to just give up asking after you get a wrong answer 2 or 3 times. To do so, just set the “Max wrong asnwer before give up” parameter in your question to any value above zero: that would be the number of tries your user will get.
How to check if the question was given up?
If the question reaches the max wrong inputs counter, the target variable you’ve chosen will be empty: you can check that in your flow and react accordingly.