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” [...]
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 [...]
We as VUI Designers struggle with callers wanting and expecting more features (featuritis) while requiring simple to use interfaces. So what can we do about it?
(Adaptation from Gerry McGovern’s New Thinking column) Marketing and legal messages, as well as reference to “visit our website” are the curse of the Phone. Those intrusive messages reflect a company way of thinking that’s centered around what the company wants to tell a caller, and not on why the caller is picking up the [...]
As an added bonus for all those VUI Designers out there, I want to add one more guideline for handling errors when designing Voice User Interfaces: Guideline #6: Be relevant Throughout the system, any good design should strive to obtain as much information as possible from user profiles, back ends or any other sources [...]
Wrapping up the series, here’s the fifth guideline for handling errors when designing Voice User Interfaces: Guideline #5: No need for help This is another controversial guideline in which VUI designers again advocate either its use or its avoidance, without any clear consensus. The idea of “help” (specific error prompt normally played a caller says [...]
Getting close to the end of the series, here’s the fourth guideline for handling errors when designing Voice User Interfaces: Guideline #4: Second-level errors should be relevant and informative Even though this sounds obvious, most applications out in the market tend to use a second-level error strategy which boils down to either a repetition [...]
Continuing the series, here’s the third guideline for handling errors when designing Voice User Interfaces: Guideline #3: Avoid the use of delayed help This is a controversial guideline in which VUI designers don’t seem to have found a consensus on whether the benefits justify the difficulty of implementing it properly. The idea of “delayed [...]
