Voice User Interface Design VUI

Outbound calling (meaning automated phone calls that go out to specific individuals) is a very profitable business that thrives at times such as this one when companies need to reach more consumers yet want to reduce the costs of making those calls since most of the time they are nothing more than the equivalent of “phone spam”.

Therefore, I’ve never been a big fan of these types of services, except for those situations where I know we’re adding value to the conversation. Those situations where we’re providing a benefit to consumers, particularly in win-win scenarios where both parties benefit from the interaction.

One product/service I recently found out about that does exactly that is GlowCaps Connect. GlowCaps are electronic pill caps that use some very clever means to ensure patients take their medicine at the times and frequency that they should.

So picture this. If you know someone that needs to manage a chronic disease like diabetes or depression, daily medications are essential for their well being. What this device does is that every day, at the prescribed time, the GlowCap uses a myriad of modalities to remind users and attract their attention. For example, it may flash a visual reminder which is followed by sound if the bottle is not opened within the first hour. If the patient still doesn’t open the bottle, then the cap triggers a phone call to remind them and can even send weekly updates to friends and family as well as send reports to the patient’s doctor with a monthly summary of the bottle’s activity.

So, to summarize, better prescription handling which can be rewarded with coupons and incentives, better healthcare management with the doctor, and an opportunity for pharmacies to handle automatic refills. Those are the types of calls I wouldn’t mind at dinner time.

As of yesterday, the Association of Voice Interaction Design AVIxD site is live and available. If you’re a practitioner of voice and multimodal experience design, are curious about speech and it’s implementation in the real world, or simply want to hang-around self-minded individuals, make sure to check them out and apply for this year’s AVIxD Workshop (May 29 deadline).

That’s great news!

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 about links and how well can users predict what will be contained within each link.  I’ve mentioned in the past that I feel there are many similarities between the web world and the voice world, so thinking along the same lines, I feel web links are the siblings of menu choices in speech, so I felt the part where he talked about the results of only showing the first 11 characters of a link was relevant for that discussion:

The two winning links (“Gift Cards” and “New Custome”) also showcase principles for effective Web content.  Both links:

• Use plain language
• Use specific terminology
• Follow conventions for naming common features
• Front-load user- and action-oriented terms

The point being that the importance is not really on the length of the word but on its meaning.  For example he found the worse links were the ones that only showed “Introducing” and “Working whi” that had the same length as the winning ones but were bad because of:

• Bland, generic words
• Made-up words or terms
• Starting with blah-blah and deferring the information-carrying text to the end

What this means in practice is that using single word commands on a menu (e.g. “Emergency”, “Billing”, “Status”) does not necessarily make menu choices easier to understand, more intuitive for users, or faster to navigate.  On the contrary, they may limit the user’s ability to infer what can be found underneath them, creating the exact opposite effect.

JTLYK  

I have to admit that in this time and age, even with all the advantages technology provides, when it comes down to keeping track of pending items, errands and to-do-items, I tend to stay in the analog world (read pen and paper).

So I was very excited to read about a new smart phone app which seems to be tackling this problem in a very clever way by integrating the best aspects of disparate technologies such as Post-It notes, email, calendars, and voice for free! (with a Pro option available too)

It is called reQall and the way it works is that you call a free number to add “items” via your voice or text such as notes, appointments and memos.  If using your voice, they use speech recognition software to transcribe your message into text so that based on your situation (time, location, etc.), the system can remind you of those items via email, SMS, IM or even a “phone shake”.

A very nice feature is that you can also share your account with other family members and friends, so they can enter reminders for you.  Mmm, I wonder why wives love this feature so much…

Mobile search has been identified as one of those applications where Speech Recognition can become the killer app.  There are many instances in which speech recognition has been integrated with mobile devices, some of which include doing recognition embedded on the device, some others that perform the recognition on “the network” (a remote server farm) which then returns the results to the device, and some others rely on real human beings transcribing the contents of the request so they can be processed accordingly.

Then of course, comes the part of the search itself.  Some services for example, provide you with a list of links to Web pages (such as Google and Yahoo). Others, like ChaCha, uses humans to find the answers for you and then send you the response via text (and yes, you can become a “guide” for them). While some others attempt to integrate other features and capabilities of the devices such as the use of GPS and maps, or trigger subsequent reactions on other services such as changing your status in Facebook or Twitter (as is the case with Vlingo).

Now, if someone could simply find a way to use voice to find out where I left my phone, or my remote, or the car keys…

Just when you though that having a single phone number that would ring all your phones, coupled with a central voicemail inbox accesible from the web, including the ability to screen calls by listening in live as callers leave a voicemail for free couldn’t get any better, Google does it again.

That’s right. Google is revamping their GrandCentral system (which we’ve talked about before) and changing it’s name to Google Voice.

Aside from the privacy concerns that have been popping up everywhere in the blogosphere, the system and it’s features have received rave reviews and praise for the enhancements added to the platform. The one I like the best? Transcription of voicemail into text of course! That way you can read your voicemail at leisure, copy/paste them, search for specific terms, etc.  Details about all the features are available here.

The official Google blog has more details about it and Mr. Pogue has a great video showing it in action.  Even though it’s currently only available to existing GrandCentral customers (what can I saw, I got lucky ), you can still request an invitation for when Google Voice becomes available to the public sometime next week.

We’ve talked in the past about the use of speech recognition in the realm of note taking, where tools such as Jott allow you to obtain a text version of a voice message, making it easier to document and search for information.

Well, Microsoft just recently unveiled a new application of speech recognition, but this time with a twist. Microsoft Recite (available as a preview which can be downloaded) allows anyone using a Windows Mobile phone to record a voice message or “remembrance”, store it, and then retrieve it later using speech pattern recognition.

The obvious advantage of pattern recognition compared to other types of speech searches is that the message itself doesn’t have to be decoded, transcribed or converted.  It simply uses a “search” sample as a pattern to match one or more of the words against existing “remembrances”.

Even though initial test have received possitive feedback, I’m hoping they’ll expand the tool to include other devices and languages (it currently only works with US English).

The proverbial dilemma, user-centered design calls for simplicity, yet business requirements often conflict with that principle. The result? Watch, remember, and cry…

Enjoy!

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:

1. Highlight important changes

And by this I don’t mean “Please listen careful for our menu options have changed”. Here we’re talking about system status visibility - knowing where you are and that actions led to expected results. Implicit confirmations are a good example of this.

2. Enable shortcuts in your application

The key concept here is to offer users more responsive user interfaces. In the case of the phone, this can be somewhat compared to having “touch-tone equivalents” which allow expert users to breeze through applications without having to wait to be prompted for input. But here I would also argue that other things would fall under this same principle: good command selection, “shadow” options that even though not prompted for can be supported if tuning data backs up the decision, and even “parallel” choices which allow someone picking one branch to swiftly change “branches” without having to “go back” or return to a “main menu”.

3. “Upgrade” options

I feel this would be similar to having functionality available for “expert users”. Proper use of barge-in as well as multi-slot support allows someone to interact in more “advanced” ways with a system keeping such a transition simple and intuitive.

4. Advertise features of the application

And no, sending out “user manuals” for applications does not qualify for this. Here we would be talking about pointing out “new” features or even “advanced” features that are available. As with most non-task-oriented information, this should be presented only after the user has successfully completed their task.

5. Use “color-coded” lists

Items appearing together are an issue, no matter what type of interface we’re talking about. Therefore it is really important to put attention to the different tools at our disposal to avoid this issue: voice intonation/emphasis (such as making menu options clearer), word choice (avoid confusion amongst different choices), silences (natural pauses to allow mental processing of the information), etc.

6. Offer personalization options

I’m sorry to say this has been out there for quite a few years for most interfaces, yet voice user interfaces hardly ever offer them. It may be harder to do than with visual interfaces (where you can change colors, rearrange items, etc.) yet small things like offering only relevant choices based on someone profile or remembering the last tasks they’ve performed go a long way in making users feel like they “own” the system.

7. Display help messages

Help is definitively one of those topics that has been debated a lot, and like most controversial ones, whether or not it should be used and how it should be used can be summarized in two words: “it depends”. Personally I feel help should not be a stand-alone piece of a design (whether it is a tutorial or a separate collection of help prompts) but rather an integral part of design – commands offered should be helpful to a user, error messages should add relevant information to help users recover, transition messages should help users know where they are and where they are going, etc.

8. Design feedback messages carefully

Here we can think about transition messages (exit prompts) and error recovery prompts. Here, there are various things that can be done to make them more effective: control voice intonation so as to convey the right meaning, reword questions and statements so as to convey the same meaning without simply “reprompting” users (if the problem had to do with users not understanding you in the first place, simply repeating is not going to help at all)

9. Use tabbed navigation

This is one of those areas where visual design has an advantage over non-visual design. Nevertheless, good information architecture can help obtain similar results, where applications reflect user’s mental models making it easier for them to know what choices mean and how the system works. This makes users feel at ease since they feel more in control.

10. Darken background

Conversely, here non-visual design has the advantage since all interactions happen in sequence. No need to “gray out” parts of our design since by the time we move on with a new “task”, all previous information now belongs to the past.

11. Lightboxes and Slideshows

The concept here is to allow users to navigate back and forth. In the visual world there are a lot of tricks to reduce the noise and allow a user to focus on a particular item. In the case of non-visual design, there are ways to do similar things when the system has been properly architected, which should include consideration of “go back” behavior that would contextually match a user’s mental model, as well as proper “sub task” definitions so that if users need to make a change or update a certain piece of information, they don’t have to start all over again or get confused about how to do it.

12. Short sign-up forms

This is another one where non-visual design has the opportunity to leverage information. The whole notion here is to minimize the effort needed to identify a user and to speed up the process. On one hand, this means taking advantage of what technology has to offer: ANI identification, DNIS separation (ideal for language selection), CTI (please, please, please don’t loose everything that the user has accomplished so far). And on the other, there are design techniques such as the removal of “optional” elements if that allows a user to proceed (and especially if that avoids confusion and distraction from the user’s real goal).

With more people spending more time watching video on their computers than on TV, it makes sense to have a XUI – A channel for User Interface Design. Enjoy!