Voice User Interface Design VUI

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 “help” which is part of the VoiceXML specification) was developed in order to provide context-sensitive assistance to callers struggling with a system.

Furthermore, some production systems have help messages that are everything but helpful in the sense that the do not add any information or clarification from what the previous prompts presented.

In terms of actual data, most pilot analysis data has shown that at least from an English-caller perspective (Disclaimer: foreign language pilot analysis shows user requesting ‘help’ much more often than their English counterparts), it isn’t very natural for someone to request “help” from a system.

Even when help is requested, most of the time what those callers are really looking for is an option to exit the system and talk to a live representative, or in the case of menus, they are looking for options that are not available at that particular point.

Instead of using generic help, the suggested strategy includes:

• Employ usability research to identify choices callers may be looking for or expecting in certain place of the application that are not available by design
• If options cannot be added to an application (not possible to implement), then consider adding a “something else” category which would then transfer the call to an agent. The end result is the same as erroring out, but it gives callers confidence that the system is working and that they are moving on successfully
• Include instructions on how to talk to someone on the second-level error prompt

Other articles on this series: [1], [2], [3], [4] and [extra]

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 11:07 am and is filed under Usability, Dialog Design. 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.