One very interesting trend that came up a handful of times during this year’s SpeechTEK East Conference was the use of Alternative A/B Call Flow designs, pushed by companies such as SpeechCycle and Google. The basic premises of A/B Call Flow Design are that designs shouldn’t use a single path for all interactions, and that [...]
As promised, here’s a copy of my presentation from this year’s SpeechTEK in New York: “Customers Request the Darndest Things – 10 Challenges for VUI Designers” Description: Business owners have business goals, objectives, and requirements. Designers bring experience and advocate user needs throughout the design process. So how can we create outstanding experiences when objectives [...]
A common problem we always face is how to deal with Menu Choices… How many menus do I need? In which order should they be presented? Are the labels I’m using clear? Should I concentrate on actions callers can perform or objects they are looking for? In particular, one that’s pretty hard to solve is [...]
There was recently a very interesting discussion on the VUIDs board regarding timeouts and their guidelines, so I decided to share with you the ones I use for “inter-word timeouts” (also known as ep.EndSeconds in the Nuance platform, or as incompletetimeout in the VXML world). By inter-word timeouts I’m referring to how much silence takes [...]
I was reading an article this morning about things we can learn from Social Design. In particular, what I liked was the fact that they weren’t trying to analyze the typical examples – Facebook, YouTube, SecondLife, etc. – but rather learn from the mistakes of other less-known ventures. In particular, there were four “Lessons Learned” [...]
NPR has a very interesting that explores how human behavior isn’t limited to real world interactions but actually extends to others types of interactions, including virtual worlds such as Second Life. Which makes me wonder… if it’s in our nature to balance things such as personal distance and eye contact in both the real and [...]
It is very interesting to see how this new Web2.0 wave allows apparently disparate technologies to be merged together and implemented in radical new ways. Robert Scoble recently covered how Nexidia is using phonetic search to index video and audio content which then can be searched. And not only that, but by having a textual [...]
In most conferences, events and training classes, one common argument is that Self-Service Systems and IVR would be much better if we as an industry were able to craft a set of best practices everyone would follow. In fact, the “GetHuman” movement and its standard is an attempt to dictate how customer service phone systems [...]
How many times have we heard that we should focus on our users (customers), that systems should be easy to navigate and callers should be able to find what they are looking for… as long as we include the things a current system is doing, what the website offers, and what the marketing department wants [...]
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 [...]
