UX for Voice: Creating a verbal design system in 3 steps.

Warning: the following article is full of foody allusions, please don’t read if you haven’t had your breakfast yet.

In the fascinating world of voice bot development, creating a multi-purpose and complex voice bot that caters to various use cases necessitates a focus on scalability. Have you ever seen MasterChef? Just like an aspiring chef needs a well-stocked pantry and a recipe book to whip up a delightful culinary experience, a comprehensive design system can be your secret ingredient to achieve a durable voice bot development process (but without Gordon Ramsey yelling at you over scrambled eggs).

“What’s a design system” you might ask as if you’re new to user experience design?

If you’re not familiar with the term:

A design system is an organized collection of guidelines, reusable components, and resources that help teams design and build consistent, cohesive, and scalable digital products, such as websites, applications, or voice interfaces.

A design system serves as a single source of truth, streamlining the design and development process, improving collaboration, and ensuring a unified user experience across different platforms and devices. Let’s see it as your digital kitchen.

While design systems primarily emerged from the world of website and app development, they can be effectively adapted for UI-less products, such as voice assistants. This is where a specific term of verbal design system comes into play.

A verbal design system is a comprehensive framework that guides the creation and management of a voice user interface (VUI) or voice bot. It outlines the principles, patterns, and best practices for designing a coherent, engaging, user-friendly and (fill in your adjective) voice experience.

If a verbal design system is your kitchen then verbal component library is your pantry. Creating a verbal component library based on your verbal design system involves organizing and documenting reusable language elements that align with your voice interface’s tone, personality, and conversation flows. It’s the ingredients that you always have close and that you can reuse whenever needed.

Just as a recipe book provides clear instructions, ingredient lists, and techniques for creating consistent and delicious dishes, a verbal design system offers guidelines and best practices for designing engaging and user-friendly voice interactions, while verbal component library provides you with reusable components, or ingredients, that you will use to create your recipes.

Now that we know what a verbal design system is, we may ask ourselves: what exactly might it contain and what are the elements that would constitute my VDS?

So, the main elements to consider and include in your VDS kitchen are:

1. Voice and tone guidelines: These guidelines establish a consistent personality, tone, and style for the voice bot, which is essential for crafting a cohesive and engaging user experience. The salt and pepper of your voice bot.
2. Conversation flows: This component maps out different conversation paths users can take when interacting with the voice bot, including linear and non-linear flows, branching points, and fallback strategies. Is that a 3 or a 6-course meal?
3. Verbal components: As mentioned previously, this is a library of pre-defined phrases, prompts, responses, and error messages that can be utilized across various interactions, aligning with the voice bot’s overall tone and personality. Stock up your ingredients’ pantry.
4. Design patterns and best practices: These approaches have been proven effective for designing voice interactions, addressing aspects such as user onboarding, confirmation, error handling, and context-switching. This is your cookbook.
5. Dialogue management: This element involves the voice bot’s processing and understanding of user input, conversation state management, and appropriate response determination. It may include natural language understanding (NLU), intent recognition, and context-awareness. The secret sauce to understanding user input and serving up perfect responses.
6. Speech synthesis customization: Guidelines on using Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) or other tools to enhance the bot’s speech output, including adjusting pronunciation, pitch, speed, and pauses for a more natural and engaging experience. A garnish of natural-sounding speech to make your bot the talk of the town.
7. Accessibility and inclusivity: Recommendations for designing voice interactions that accommodate users with different abilities, languages, and cultural backgrounds, ensuring a more inclusive and accessible user experience. Voice bot cuisine that caters to everyone’s taste buds, no matter their background or ability.
8. Testing and validation: Best practices for evaluating the voice bot’s performance, usability, and user satisfaction, as well as refining and improving the design based on user feedback. Making sure your voice bot gets reviews from all your users, good or bad.
9. Scalability and maintenance: Guidelines for updating, expanding, and maintaining the verbal design system as the voice bot grows and evolves. Keep your verbal design system fresh and ready to grow with your voice bot’s ever-expanding menu.

We’re now approaching the main course of this article, the 3 steps to get you successfully started with the verbal design system. They are: Research, Define and Scale, and each envolves particular guidelines that you can follow to end up with an edible design system at the end. Let’s start with:

Research.

This step is about gathering information, analyzing existing solutions, and identifying user needs, preferences, and expectations to inform and guide the design decisions.

1. Verbal landscape: Creating a verbal landscape involves defining the language elements, tone, and style that shape your voice interface’s communication and personality. Your verbal landscape can be based on one or several user personas. While having a user persona is not absolutely necessary for creating a voice design system, it can be highly beneficial in guiding your design decisions and ensuring a more user-centric approach. A user persona is a fictional representation of your target user, based on research and data, that helps you empathize with their needs, preferences, and expectations.
2. Research and benchmarking: Study existing voice interfaces, applications, and design systems to gather insights and inspiration. Identify best practices and common patterns that can inform your design decisions.
3. Explore technological capabilities and limitations: Familiarize yourself with the available voice technology, such as natural language understanding (NLU), speech synthesis, and dialogue management. Understand their capabilities and limitations to ensure your design system aligns with the technology’s constraints and possibilities.

Define.

This if the second phase in the development of a verbal design system, where you take the insights and knowledge gathered during the research step and use them to establish clear guidelines, components, and patterns for your voice interface. Here’s a breakdown:

1. Create voice and tone guidelines: Establish a consistent voice and tone for your voice interface, taking into account the purpose of the interface and the preferences of your target audience. Consider aspects such as formality, friendliness, and approachability.
2. Map conversation flows: Outline potential conversation paths and user interactions, including greetings, prompts, responses, and error messages. Consider linear and non-linear flows, as well as branching points and fallback strategies.
3. Develop verbal components: Create a library of pre-defined phrases, prompts, and responses that align with your voice interface’s tone and personality. Ensure these components are clear, concise, and easy to understand, and consider variations to avoid repetitiveness.
4. Establish design patterns and best practices: Identify tried and tested approaches to voice interface design and incorporate them into your verbal design system. Address aspects such as user onboarding, confirmation, error handling, and context-switching.

Scale.

The scale step is the third and final phase in the development of a verbal design system, focused on organizing, maintaining, and expanding the system to ensure it remains effective, relevant, and adaptable as your voice interface grows and evolves. Things to take into consideration:

1. Modular approach: Organize your verbal design system into modular components and patterns that can be easily reused, combined, and extended. This will enable you to add or modify components without disrupting the existing system.
2. Clear organization and categorization: Keep your verbal design system kitchen tidy and efficient. Categorize and organize the elements of your verbal design system, such as voice and tone guidelines, conversation flows, and verbal components, in a logical and intuitive manner. This will make it easier to locate, use, and update the components as needed.
3. Flexible conversation flows: Create voice interactions that can adapt to new menu items with ease. Design conversation flows that can accommodate new interactions, tasks, or features with minimal disruption. Consider using variables, placeholders, and dynamic content to make the flows more adaptable.
4. Versioning and change management: Establish a process for versioning your verbal design system and tracking changes over time. This will help you manage updates, rollbacks, and the evolution of the system more effectively.
5. Documentation and collaboration: Ensure everyone in your culinary team has access to components they need. Create comprehensive documentation that explains the purpose, usage, and organization of your verbal design system. This will make it easier for team members to understand, use, and contribute to the system, ensuring a more consistent and scalable approach.
6. User feedback and iteration: Continuously gather user feedback to identify areas for improvement and expansion in your verbal design system. Use this feedback to refine your components, flows, and guidelines, and to ensure the system remains relevant and effective as it scales.
7. Plan for localization and accessibility: Design your verbal design system with localization and accessibility in mind, allowing for easy adaptation to different languages, cultures, and user abilities. This will make it more inclusive and scalable across diverse user groups.
8. Regular review and maintenance: Schedule periodic reviews of your verbal design system to assess its effectiveness, identify areas for improvement, and plan for future growth. Keep the system updated and well-maintained to ensure scalability and long-term success.

To sum up.

If you’re as much into foodie analogies as me, here’s a roundup of what we’ve been thought:

The verbal design system is your voice assistant kitchen. It has verbal components that are the ingredients used in different recipes, which can be mixed and matched to create various interactions. The verbal landscape if the flavor profile of the dish, ensuring the dish appeals to the intended audience and suits the occasion. Conversation flows are the sequence of steps and processes involved in preparing the dish, guiding users through a satisfying experience. Design patterns and best practices are the tried-and-tested cooking techniques that ensure a successful outcome. Dialogue management is the way the ingredients interact and combine during the cooking process to create a coherent and enjoyable result. Speech synthesis customization is the fine-tuning of presentation and garnishing to make the dish more visually appealing and engaging. Accessibility and inclusivity are the considerations for dietary restrictions, preferences, and cultural backgrounds to ensure the dish is enjoyable for all. Be sure to keep your kitchen organised, your recipes updated and detailed and your pantry fresh. And be sure you make notes when someone tells you that your dish smells funny.

Remember, a well-crafted verbal design system is like a secret family recipe passed down through generations. It not only streamlines the development process but also ensures a consistent, engaging, and user-friendly voice experience across all interactions.

And that’s a wrap (pun intended).