Voice UIs and Conversational UIs: the challenge to UX practitioners
There’s a lot of buzz around Voice UI (VUI) and Conversational UI (CUI) at the moment, which despite their key differences present designers with many similar challenges: on the one hand you have devices like the Amazon Echo and the Google Home, which remove traditional interactive user interfaces in favour of voice control; while on the other you have the burgeoning chatbot scene which typically use SMS-style interfaces to support text-based interactions.
These are fascinating as they pose a whole new set of problems for Interface or Interaction Designers: how do your users find what they are looking for without any of the visual or structural affordances that a website or app can provide? (e.g.: button labels, page titles & headings, imagery)
“Where do I start?”
Information seeking is complicated: the Information Architect
(@maadonna) did some fantastic work on information seeking behaviours and how to design systems for them, but that was before we removed all the affordances; and before we had a new set of paradigms to consider.A VUI or CUI platform’s success will rely heavily on designers creating sophisticated algorithms and flows to support natural dialogue, which can be complicated, quirky and littered with slang terms and colloquialisms. If any of these “conversations” go wrong there is potential to break the user experience.
“What’s behind the curtain?”
Imagine travelling all the way across the magical and mysterious Land of Oz to see the great Wizard and ask for some courage, but when you finally get there and ask, his reply is “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that question. Would you like me to search Google for ‘carriage’?”
The VUI and CUI platforms that are still around in 5 years will be the ones that get this right; the ones where you’re so naturally engaged that your mind never wanders to considering what’s behind the big green curtain.
Resurgence of the lost art of Information Architecture
I believe there will be a renewed interest in areas of UX such as Information Architecture as we come to realise how integral a solid information architecture is to making these types of interface work well, in much the same way as Interaction Design has been crucial in improving the experience of using web and app-based visual UIs.
For most users of digital services and products, interactions have always been focussed around visual interfaces, and though language has always played a key role in these UIs (in the form of headings, labels and other artefacts of information architecture), once the whole interface is language the role of IAs (and potentially newer roles like UX writers) is likely to increase.
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The above is the full version of my contribution to this article: http://whatusersdo.com/blog/ui-design-trends-2017/
