Whenever I visit an art museum and get exposed to various painting styles, I’ve got to admit I prefer Realism over other painting styles, especially those belonging to Surrealist or Abstract art movements. And I guess part of it is because with Realism, we all tend to converge on the meaning of an image and the qualities of the artists, whereas on other styles, both the meaning and interpretation of the piece are absolutely subjective and the beauty of it are in the eye of the beholder.
Reflecting upon those things, I ran across Mark Hurst’s Good Experience newsletter that talked something similar, but in the context of wine. He talked about how “the experience of drinking wine is determined less by the wine itself and more by the consumer’s own expectations for the wine.”
In particular, the thing that baffled me was the New Yorker article about the research done at the University of Bordeaux where participants provided opposite feedback for the exact same wine only because it had a different label, which created a very different set of expectations on them. Furthermore, in the second example, participants in Vegas not only had different expectations but actually showed that customers preferred a fake thing over a real one.
Which made me think about our reality in the world of VUI design and the expectations caller have when the reach a self-service system. Would we see similar responses if we were to simply change the label of our solutions? What would happen if we were to give callers a fake thing (automation) and call it real (agent)? Is part of our challenge as VUI designers to help morph the expectations callers bring to the call to something different, more advantageous for the actual experience?
Digging deeper on that last thought, I kept thinking about my recent experience with self-service solutions as well as feedback I received from friends, family and peers that have used speech recognition systems… I noticed there was a strong correlation between how “good” they felt the system was and the expectation they had when they picked up the phone in the first place.
For example, someone was having a technical issue during the early morning hours and needed help right away. They first attempted to solve it by themselves via manuals and web queries with little success. Therefore they had as a last resort the option of attempting to talk to someone (knowing that most likely they would get an “our offices are currently closed” type of message). In that scenario, being able to reach an automated system that was able to retrieve that customer’s information from the number they dialed from (ANI) and was able to provide step-by-step instructions on how to restore the system back to normal, yielded an “extraordinary experience” for that customer.
But those types of expectations come included with the caller and the context of the situation. So here’s the question again, is it possible to change those expectations on the fly, while a caller is interacting with the system? Are there other fields out there that may be already doing it from which we can learn? Advertising maybe?