Voice User Interface Design VUI

I had a very interesting experience recently. I was at a customer’s site performing some on-site multi-modal usability testing that involved participants who could perform some of their day-to-day operations via a palm-based device using the keyboard, the device keys, the stylus, or of course, good old speech recognition.

But where things got really interesting was when we just arrived to the city. We were staying close to the city’s downtown but were totally new to the area. After driving around for about half an hour, we were really hungry, it was getting late, and we were supposed to have a meeting in an hour to finalize the details for the next day’s sessions.

Therefore we each pulled out or cell phones/palm devices and attempted to find a restaurant close by… the testers became participants themselves…

First of all, we attempted to use the web browser capabilities of one device, went to the mobile version of Google maps and searched for an Italian restaurant around the city’s downtown. After a couple of minutes of painfully slow interactions, we found out that the interface wasn’t particularly intuitive, the search results started to appear all the way down the page making it seem as if the results page was empty, some of the links ended up in 404 error pages, and at the end of the day, all we were able to get was a collection of restaurants with an address but no phone numbers. So, for someone who’s driving around, you can imagine that having a physical address is not particularly useful.

After that, we decided to drop the web and attempt to use speech recognition. For that, I attempted to use the “Restaurants” feature of Tellme, but after getting to the main menu and saying “Restaurants”, it took me to the Restaurant Reviews section of their portal - which sounded promising if I could find a restaurant close by as well as some sort of review of it. From there, it asked me for a city and state which I provided, but then was presented with a message saying they were only collection reviews for the Bay Area.

At that point, we had lost another 20 minutes trying to find a restaurant using mobile applications with very little success, which really made me thought about the importance of understanding how will callers use our designs and the context in which they will be making their calls. On top of that, it also made me think about some of the reasons why mobile applications may not be gaining the acceptance we would expect, and why simply providing mobile access to the web may not be the real solution for on-the-road self-service solutions.

But don’t worry, we actually managed to get a good Italian meal and still made it on time for our meeting. We simply opted for Plan C… stop and ask for directions.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Usability, Customer Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.