User onboarding

The first thing to focus on is to offer your user a smooth onboarding experience. You may design a classic wizard with a step-by-step approach or have a more inovative approach like chatbot or voice-based UIs.

The Sessions API helps you implement such a UI. A session is very similar to what most of us know from web programming: an ordered sequence of steps that share the same state. Although this is a unified developer experience, each skill may have particular steps to implement.

Practical examples:

• getting the user consent for an account information skill is a one-step session (i.e. trigger the strong customer authentication process)

• selling a bank deposit product takes the user through multiple steps where the user may be required to submit information and upload data in separate steps due to inter-step dependencies.

As we integrate more skills into the middleware, we'll be documenting the required steps for each case. The Sessions API is generic enough to support complex conversational UIs that involve multiple iterations, uploads, synchronous and asynchronous communication (eg: cases where the online session might be interrupted due to an offline verification).

This diagram is an example of a three-step session, where the first two steps have attachments (uploads).