WECIL: Cecil from WECIL, The Chatbot
A chatbot designed for disabled people by disabled people. Introducing Cecil from WECIL.
WECIL: Cecil the Chatbot
Extracting the knowledge
Designed by people with disabilities, for people with disabilities. WECIL (West England Centre for Independent Living) provides support to a wide range of individuals, including people with disabilities, their families, friends, caregivers, and other healthcare professionals. Their website contains helpful information, but finding the information that’s right for a user’s particular situation can be tricky or overwhelming, as in some cases, the answer can be pretty complicated. This is where the ‘Navigators’ come into play. Each Navigator working for the charity is knowledgeable in specific areas of support, which they provide through the charity’s helpline. What the Navigators realised was that many of the requests for support that they were receiving were straightforward, but this meant that the line was being tied up for those cases that were more complex. Our first step in creating a helpful bot was to extract their knowledge, allowing us to create a virtual version of a navigator.
Mapping the user journeys
To achieve this, we organised a series of workshops and invited as many ‘Navigators’ as possible to attend. From here, we worked in collaboration to ‘map’ all the types of enquiries and support they offer in each of the many areas of their service.
Using Miro, we created a vast map of user journeys, which we then went away to refine and simplify as much as possible. We also included safeguarding journeys in case anyone using the bot was concerned about their own or another person’s safety.
Building the bot
We built the bot using Chatbot.com. It employs an intuitive GUI (Graphical User Interface) that allowed us to recreate the journey maps we’d created in Miro, then we added navigation so that each journey can return to a point of origin, added all the content, links, images and keyword association to allow users to type their question and be auto navigated to the appropriate part of the journey. It also includes its UI widget, which can be styled and embedded in a website using just a few lines of code. Best of all, for charities, they offer a non-profit discount.
The chatbot also functions like an Easy Read document. Easy Read documents are designed to make written information more accessible by using short, simple sentences without jargon, along with clear images that help explain the content.
When you open it, you’re presented with options including visual options, to help find the right information. This in turn makes our website more navigable for people who are learning disabled or who are neurodivergent.
Creating the persona
From the many chatbots we’ve created over the last few years, we’ve found that creating an appropriate persona and tone of voice is crucial to the uptake and adoption of a chatbot. It’s also key that users understand that this bot isn’t a human so that expectations can be established from the very beginning of use. During our workshops with WECIL, we explored the areas of persona and tone of voice, conversation pacing and message length to create a delicate balance that still embodied WECIL and what they felt their users would respond to best.
The colour palate used in the conversational interface is meant to instil feelings of calm and is also visually accessible. Use of short sentences and emojis aims to emulate the ‘easy read’ format throughout.
Throwing in a bit of creative genius from the lead designer on the project, Christian Shannon, CECIL was born.
This was a great team effort and the client really bought into our process, even though we gave them lots of homework to do. I’m really pleased with how it turned out and I can’t wait to hear feedback from real users
The Result:
The bot went live in January 2025. Charity Digital’s Reimagining Services Survey indicates that AI chatbots are one of the most popular ways for charities to use AI in their services. We are pleased to have helped another charity adopt AI and integrate it into their service delivery.
Our work on Cecil from WECIL has been featured in:
It was a real pleasure working with Reason Digital—they truly understood the brief and what mattered to our community. What stood out was their genuine care for our users—they approached every decision with empathy and a deep understanding of accessibility. They translated that into a chatbot experience we can be proud of. Their collaborative approach and responsiveness made the process smooth from start to finish