Voiceflow built a 21,000-view publication
Picture a thousand sticky-notes blowing in the wind and you have a sense of what it feels like to plan what an enterprise's chatbot is going to say.
There are infinite things it could say. Many paths, many rules, and many stakeholders making changes. The typical process involves a forest of sticky notes and design files. Voiceflow turned that process into software. Their users, who build conversational voice and text bots at large banks and airlines, love the tool. But users would often also bemoan that people in their industry were avoiding the harder truths—like the fact that many consumers actually hate chatbots. Where could they go to discuss honestly, and build more interfaces people loved?
Voiceflow’s existing blog, nameless and forlorn, wasn’t the answer. It was “a shelf for the sort of news most tech companies create and forget about,” said the then head of content and brand.
That’s why they hired Fenwick to turn it into a home for the hot takes and honesty their audience craved. Along with their content team, we gave the publication a fresh purpose and identity. In under four months, Pathways became Voiceflow’s “thought engine,” generating twice as many sessions and leads, and then invitations to speak at conferences.
"Others give you what you ask for. Fenwick gives you what you need.”
Kristin Hillery
RESULTS
64% spike in traffic
21,000 visits
1,000s of new leads
A discipline without direction
When we began this work, Voicelfow’s community was unmoored. It consisted of conversation copywriters, UX designers, and engineers who all sat on different teams but came together in pods to build bots. They had no place to read the latest in conversation design and AI best practices. There was a “conversation design institute,” but it catered to large advertisers and churned out middling ideas free of critique.
Voiceflow customers would ask their account managers, “Where can I go to read the real stuff? Where do people talk?”
Not every brand has what it takes to be a publisher but in this case, Voiceflow did—its audience was directly asking for it. Readers had no alternative. And Voiceflow had a head of content and brand, Kristin Hillery, who helped build such a publication at the tech startup InVision. (For which Fenwick previously wrote.)
“I like Fenwick because they ask sharp, strategic questions up front that save you from mid-project existential crises,” says Kristin. “They aren’t an agency. They are so much more invested in your success than that.”
Kristin called upon Fenwick to research and understand this audience to produce a design system, strategy, and a name.
What’s in a name, or 60?
We searched for a name that could capture the varied experiences of conversational AI teams—who might be copywriters, designers, or engineers. It also had to be expansive enough to keep up with AI. During this work, ChatGPT had its big break and AI was suddenly everywhere.
Kristin selected the name and concept “Pathways.”
Pathways is a promise on many layers. It’s Voiceflow’s promise to help guide conversational designers through rapidly unfolding careers with real builds and teardowns. Yet it’s also a metaphor for the infinite pathways a conversation can follow, and for which designers must prepare.
We wrote a purpose statement: Pathways is the publication you’ve been searching for. We’re a community of the best designers, engineers, leaders, dreamers, and tinkerers in conversational AI right now, forging our own paths. It’s not just a publication—it’s a platform for the people who are building the future.
With the visuals, we sought to create an ethereal world where endless possibilities could lead down endless paths. And, to incorporate AI imagery. Conversation bots were increasingly using large language models and it was essential we celebrate that with motifs the Voiceflow team could generate on their own with AI.
We produced a flight of graphical styles that together, would feel cohesive—some, pre-generated, so they could draw from a well-stocked repository. “We had a small team without design support so we needed more than just wireframes, we needed ways to execute,” Kristin recalls. We handed off a repository of diverse images and graphics, templatized for easy reconfiguration and reuse.
The publication took on a life of its own
Voiceflow was an unqualified success right from the start and grew to the point where it required an in-house editor. Traffic spiked as fast as praise. Contributors from their 10,000-strong community lined up to have their say and basked in the intellectually honesty of Voiceflow’s honest teardowns of newly launched chatbots.
Pathways worked because it was bracingly honest. It’s a place for people to gather and have the actual conversations the rest of the industry isn’t willing to. It’s a risk. But nothing risked, nothing gained.
Pathways into the future
Publications aren’t always a great option. Sometimes, B2B audiences are too small and the alternatives are too plentiful. But this team had all the pieces and their audience, nowhere else to go. If Voiceflow was going to do it, they might as well do it all the way—and build a real identity, as we did. Because Kristin knew what great publishers do: People don’t just want stories, they want meaning. It’s not about the words up there. It’s about the sense of togetherness you feel when someone writes something you were thinking but hadn’t yet formulated—and makes that private teardown public.
