Interesting how the world around us can teach us many design lessons. In particular, I spent some time with my family in the California area, where I had a chance to experience design without intent. This happened at a sea-themed park where after watching some shows and enjoying some rides I started noticing the overwhelming [...]
I just realized that for some reason the digital handout for my presentation isn’t available on SpeechTEK’s site. While I sort that out, I though about proactively posting the deck for anyone wanting to download a copy. The session is entitled “Lessons in Multimodal Interaction Design”, and particularly, the topic I’m going to cover is [...]
I was recently watching a presentation from Dan Ariely regarding the nature of human decision making and how we all are “predictably irrational”. The example I found most interesting and relevant was a little experiment he ran based on an ad for the Economist magazine and the various subscription choices it offered. Here’s the setup; [...]
I was recently asked about the presence of humor in IVR applications. To be honest with you, I haven’t ran across too many of those, other than the one implemented at Travelocity. One of their menu choices is to hear a gnome joke. On top of it, they allowed user participation by inviting people to [...]
As you know, I enjoy looking at other fields that might have design elements that could be leveraged in a speech and multimodal world. My latest discovery was the film “Objectified” by Gary Hustwit. Even though the documentary is centered around the topic of Industrial Design and the process by which well known products are [...]
During any Requirement’s Gathering process, one of the hardest yet most critical steps involves finding out the features that will be offered to the users. Figuring out the final set normally involves talking to agents, listening to the different business units, looking at statistics, etc. Furthermore, if the customer is migrating from an existing system [...]
Oh yeah, it’s that time of the year again. If you’re planning to attend this year’s SpeechTEK in New York, please stop by and say hi. Also, you can now look at the final version of the program. In particular, I would like to invite you to the following sessions: Introduction to Voice User Interface [...]
A very interesting report from Nielsen was recently published highlighting some of the challenges mobile users face when accessing web information. Aside from the sad news about average success rates being around 59%, it was interesting to me to see how most of the Mobile Problems outlined in the report can be actually seen as [...]
An interesting discussion came up this week where there was a debate about the length of menu choices and how short/long options should be to help users move along in both an efficient and successful way through a system. Interestingly enough, around the same time I ran across an article from Nielsen talking about taking [...]
Smashing Magazine just published an article about Useful Techniques for Good UI Design, that even though concentrated on Web Applications, I felt there were a few techniques that could be reviewed with an eye towards VUI design: Highlight important changes And by this I don’t mean “Please listen careful for our menu options have changed”. [...]
