Shilpi Dewan, Conversation Designer at Intuit, shares her top case studies and resources to help you create more human interfaces.
Advances in speech and text recognition are enabling a boom in products powered by conversation design.
The most obvious of these are voice assistants. They have been in our phones for years, and now are entering our homes as stand-alone devices like the Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa or Apple's Home Pod. According to a report by Juniper Research, the number of voice assistants is set to triple from 2.5 billion in 2018 to 8 billion in 2023.
But voice assistants are far from the only product powered by conversation design —chatbots are expanding as well. Have you contacted Amazon customer support lately? Then you would have experienced Amazon's chatbot trying to first solve your query and, if that's not possible, getting as much context on your problem to make your interaction with a human agent more efficient.
All these means that the role of the conversation designer, previously an obscure role, is set to grow and become mainstream. Conversation design is a synthesis of several design disciplines, including voice user interface design, interaction design, visual design, motion design, audio design, and UX writing.
The role of a conversation designer is to create applications that leverage human conversation, to create a user experience that feels natural and effortless to the user.
They curate the conversation, defining the flow and its underlying logic in a detailed design specification that represents the complete user experience. They partner with stakeholders and developers to iterate on the designs and bring the experience to life.
This comprehensive refresher for conversation design principles gives an overview of the VUI and multimodal design. As is the characteristic of Google, the scannable content, combined with an easy read, is easily one of the best resources on the web.
Robert Sens, Full-Stack User Experience & Interaction Designer, shares the detailed process of designing a conversational experience for a mobile app startup in the hospitality space. (Premium Medium article.)
Tom Hewitson, Conversation designer & founder of labworks.io, curates a collection of some of the best resources on the web he found. The article is comfortably indexed in a bot-building-process context.
Mikko Rindell, Marketing Director, GetJenny, lists out some successful chatbots across industries. Delving into each chatbot’s style of conversations, Mikko aptly analyzes how each bot engages customers and boosts businesses.
Richard Nagyfi, Research & Development Engineer, outlines the stages of creating a conversational AI — from design to testing. The learnings give insights into the inner workings of both ChatBots and Smart Voice Assistants.
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