Where is your voice? - Voice design principles

Voice is here to stay. With services like Amazon Voice Service and devices like Alexa or Google home coming up in every home this is the brave new world of software interfaces.

The paradigm shift started when Apple first saved us from the clunky commands in a black DOS prompt back in 1984. This led to the wonderful world of the mouse, the click, the drag and the drop. Then Palm Pilot (remember those green things?) gave the excitement of a tap (more a poke with stylus, but not bad) in 1997. Then Steve Jobs came back to save us again with his iPhone (note to self: do not give a link) in 2007 with it’s fancy touch, pinch, pull and elasticity. We have to thank Jony Ive and his genius for making us humans get closer to technology.

Now is the new shift to two directions - XR with its full immersion on interface where interface is everything to Voice and its invisible interface - Alan Cooper’s dream come true with the most unobtrusive interface imaginable - the no interface.

As with every new design paradigm shift the new world of XR and voice requires us to re-think, re-learn and re-discover the design, development and testing process of software development. We found this with our recent projects in VR in our development and even testing. The same is very much true for voice user interfaces (VUI). A new design principle guides this space - the situational design. Voice apps require that software be designed with:

“Voice First Design”

Voice first design requires us to re-learn our thinking about software interfaces. Here are some pointer to start this re-think:

Expect variability and be adaptable

Each user is different and their use of spoken words is distinct and variable. What works for one, even a group will not work for everyone. All your designs need to take this into consideration, make the interfaces adaptable to user’s change of voice.

…the designer’s job shifts from picking the one label that works best for everyone to providing a range of utterances …

Personalize and individualize

You need to create a personal experience for users, whatever the actual voice device is intended for or your software is used for. The way to accomplish this is very different from what you are used to say for a mobile app where you might have the same popup to display personal data such as list of favorite sites. In voice interactions the interaction must be personalized since the same interaction, say with all the members of a family in the house where your app is running, will feel robotic rather than real and approachable.

Voice-first interactions should offer richer design. They should be predictable yet varied and delightful.

Expect to be called anytime

Gone are the days where users will need to switch on a device, find your app, click on a button to find you and get you to do something for them. They will expect you to be always there, a call away. You have no hierarchy of options - everything is first level, everything is ready to be called at moments notice.

You don’t want to be like those dismal IVRs that keep asking you to press 1 for life and 2 for death, do you?

Converse, be more human

Voice is inherently human like. Users will expect human like behavior from your app. The formality and disconnectedness of an app running in your computer is gone. Users’ expectation will be of a friend ready to be asked something, waiting to help out. Just google what people have been asking Siri. This is the new normal!

OK, done for today, but I have to get Scott Adam’s stab at this new fangled contraption before I go :) As always stolen without a hint of guilt…