Voice First
A lens to examine and explore new experiences
Remember when mobile first was the new way of thinking about how you design a new experience? This was back in 2009 when mobile was still fairly new and treated as an afterthought to the primary computer based interface.
Well, what if we’re at the cusp of a new era where we need to think voice first? Sure, not everything in the world makes sense to do with voice. But that was and still is true of mobile as well.
Voice interfaces are rapidly becoming more pervasive, with a personal voice assistant in everyone’s pocket, and additional voice assistants in everyone’s home. The conversation is evolving from “wouldn’t it be cool if we had this voice feature” to using voice first as a purposeful lens to examine and explore potential experiences.
Luke Wroblewski’s three reasons for why web applications should be designed mobile first were:
- Mobile is exploding
- Mobile forces you to focus
- Mobile extends your capabilities
Let’s see how voice compares:
1. Voice is exploding
According to data from the market intelligence firm Tractica, the number of consumers using virtual digital assistants is expected to rise from 504 million in 2016 to more than 1.8 billion in 2021. — Business Insider August 2016
2. Voice forces you to hyper-focus
If mobile first forced you to “focus on only the most important data and actions,” voice first forces you to hyper-focus.
A small screen meant getting rid of superfluous elements. With voice, we lose the ability to skim or glance, since everything must be said or heard linearly. So once again, it’s time to focus and prioritize what is most important for the user to accomplish.
3. Voice extends your (human) capabilities
While mobile first was more about the new GPS, accelerometer, and multi-touch technology capabilities that PC browsers lacked, I’d argue that voice first is about extending human capabilities. Your hands and eyes are free to do anything and everything else in your life that does not involve having your eyes glued to a screen. What can you do now that you are free to move around and engage in other physical activities and simultaneously engage with voice?
I’m not advocating voice-only experiences as the only path forward, or that you even must have voice as a touchpoint for your experience. I believe in experiences that holistically consider how they fit into the bigger picture of multiple devices and interaction models.
I am advocating asking the question: what if we were to design this with voice first? What would be the most important user tasks? What would our target user be able to do when untethered from a device? How would this improve our overall user experience if we first explore a voice interface?
Ask the voice first question upfront as part of the design exploration process, so you can holistically design your experience in this world where voice assistants and voice interfaces are becoming pervasive. If the answer to the question is that voice doesn’t make sense for your users — that’s a legitimate answer and you probably shouldn’t make a useless voice interface in that case. But if voice does make sense for your users, then allow yourself to explore it. It will make your overall experience better to have gone through the voice first exercise, even if you choose not to prioritize building the voice interface.
