Error recovery strategies and the verbiage around them has always been a hot topic of debate. We’ve all heard the classical “I’m sorry I didn’t hear you.” and “I’m sorry I didn’t understand you.” messages that are normally implemented as global prefixes to further attempts to help users get back on track. Some other designers [...]
Wow, I didn’t realize how long it’s been since my last post. I guess the good news is that it has been because I’ve been really busy, which for you means new and very interesting stuff is coming soon with regards to VUI design in even wider (and more recent) contexts such as vehicles, multimodality, [...]
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 [...]
Someone recently brought to my attention the fantastic keynote presentation by Bill Buxton (the author of Sketching User Experiences) from this year’s Mix 09 event. The concepts and ideas mentioned by Bill — particularly the notion of ROE or Return On Experience — resonated so much with me, that I think his vision should help [...]
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 [...]
Very interesting debate was triggered by the recent tests (Part 1 and Part 2) on Google Voice performed by readers of the Gadgetwise blog. The overall premise was for readers to call the article?s writer phone number and leave a creative voicemail to gauge the effectiveness of Google?s voicemail transcription system. Even though at first [...]
It was very interesting that we were just recently talking about what it would take to make documentation actually useful, and a couple of weeks later I heard about a new book by the GuiMags guys (creators of a magnet-based prototyping tool for interface design) titled “The Unplugged.” What I find very interesting about it [...]
I was recently reading an article about the future of wireframes in the context of user interface design documentation. Wireframes have been used mostly for visual elements and became a critical building block in the early days of the web. But since I like drawing analogies between other UI fields and the VUI field, there [...]
