Can we convert our callers into passionate callers? (not just survivors)
Posted by: eolvera, in Usability, Dialog Design
That’s what Kathy Sierra blogs about, and in particular, she had some very interesting remarks in her speech at this week’s “South by Southwest” (SXSW) conference.
Some of the ones that I feel include the Voice User Interface community and challenge us to think outside the box include:
- “How can we make our apps feel more human (without the smell part)?”
- “What can a human do with another human that they can’t do with a computer?” (or phone in our case)
- “By choosing help, aren’t users letting us know already they are confused?”
- “There’s nothing wrong with Help and FAQs, they are nice reference documents,… but we need something different.”
Kathy has been working for a long time in game development and seems to understand that there are many interaction elements (such as facial expressions or asking questions) that just can’t be properly interpreted and acted upon by an artificial entity with which the user is interacting. Therefore, in order to compensate for those limitations, we have to give our applications a way to know that our user is confused… in other words, we move beyond a bad application that a caller hates (what she calls the “suck threshold“) into one where the user starts to feel passionate about because systems are supporting them in what they are trying to do.
In particular, on the subject of “Help”, she explains (and I agree with her) that when people choose “Help”, a designers conception on what the user might be feeling (casual user, relaxed, no pressure) is very different from what they are really feeling… they don’t want to hear yet another navigational maze anymore than they want to hear a voice from India if they’re calling a customer service line from Arizona.
One suggested alternative is to maybe create a special question, narrow down the user choices, and then present a list of choices that’s much more context-sensitive.