Designing Conversations (Part 1)
One of the most important aspects of good VUI design is to take advantage of known conversational principles. I will paste some excerpts from Cathy Pearl’s book “Designing Voice User Experiences”
Principles of Conversational Experience
The cooperative principle refers to the fact that listeners and speakers, in order to have a successful conversation, must act cooperatively. Paul Grice introduced this idea and divided it into four maxims:
Quality :Say what you believe to be true.
Quantity :Say as much information as is needed, but not more.
Relevance :Talk about what is relevant to the conversation at hand.
Manner : Try to be clear and explain in a way that makes sense to others.
Guidelines for Voice Interactions
- Be Personal by cooperating with the user. Provide the user opportunity to have a natural back and forth dialog, adapting to the user’s preferred way of speaking and changing context.
- Be Adaptable by solving a problem for users and being careful not to create more of them. Make their lives easier by adapting to the nuances of the user’s intended speech patterns and context.
- Be Relatable. Respond with information relevant to the user’s intended context, and confirming shared understanding with the user only when necessary.
- Be Available by remembering and build upon past interactions in order to improve and speed up future ones through increased understanding of and navigation through context.
Additional Guidelines
- Allow the customer to provide more information than asked for at each step.
Avoid tasks with complex input and high ambiguity. - Have the customer select from a well-defined, simple set of options. Avoid correcting one word or part of sentence that was mis recognized, or correcting errors or ambiguity from prior voice inputs. Plan to roll with unexpected responses.
- Create well defined, concrete tasks.
Avoid tasks involving information that the customer is not readily familiar with, or complex data like long alphanumeric passwords. - Be concise.
Avoid information or data that needs further review or processing for understanding or follow up when the end goal is ambiguous. - Keep your skill interactions brief so customers can find the content they want quickly and move on.
- Avoid in-depth searching and browsing, which are better suited to personal devices with a screen.
- Keep Alexa’s speech and cadence natural and follow the fundamentals of human conversation. Customers shouldn’t have to learn specialized commands, syntax, or technical jargon, to successfully interact with your skill.
- Alexa should remember context and past interactions, as well as knowing a customer’s location and meaningful details in order to maintain familiarity and be more efficient in future exchanges.
- Alexa should try hard to understand what a customer means. That might involve resolving confusion or ambiguity, then making relevant recommendations based on the new knowledge obtained.
- Offer variety and personalized choices in your skill each time a customer starts an interaction
Who is the Audience?
Who are the people that will use my skill? (background, interests, motivation, etc.)
- Elderly patients who stay alone and forget to take their medication.
- Elderly patients who find taking medicines a daily hassle.
- Caregivers, who stay away and are worried about the health of their patients.
What will they expect from the PillPackPlus skill?
- Keep a check on their medication schedule and provide timely reminders
- Motivate patients when they feel low.
- Provide information related to their health and medication.
- Have a system, where the patients know that they are answerable to their caregivers.
When are people most likely to use the skill?
- 2–3 times everyday when it is time for them to take their medication.
How will they interact with the skill?
- The voice skill will initiate action to remind the patient of their medications and check with them to gauge if they took their medication.
- The patient can also interact with the voice skill at any time to get information related to health.
- The reminders may also take form of daily routines which indicate that it is time for medication. (Like the morning news bulletin associated with the morning regimen of medication).
Sample Dialogues
One of the best ways to begin the design process is by creating sample dialogues. A sample dialog is a snapshot of a possible interaction between your VUI and your user.
Use Case Scenarios
For creating sample dialogues, we will create them for the most common use case scenarios. The dialogues would be created for the “Happy path” and also when something goes wrong. We would call that the “Unhappy path”
Scenario 1 : Alexa sending medication reminders and expecting the patient to take them.
Scenario 2: Alexa senses a medical emergency and alerts the caregivers.
Scenario 3: Patient needs to travel outside and needs to carry medication.
To start with, I am highlighting the ‘Happy Path’ which is the simplest one and forms the backbone of the intended experience.
Scenario 1 : Alexa sending medication reminders and expecting the patient to take them.
First time medication reminder from Alexa to the patient. (On-boarding message)
The messages in this case are slightly more informative as it on-boards and introduces the patient with the medication. It also outlines any specific interaction that the patient needs to do to complete an action.
Reading out the dialogues:
<Video coming soon>
Day 2 Reminder :
The same Happy Path reminder would sound a little different the following day. Here is the script for that.
Note that in this case, it is no longer reminding the patient of the function of the medicine. There is just a brief reminder of the instructions of taking the medication. Similarly the way Alexa would interact with the patient would change according to the amount of time the patient has been interacting with the system. It would also depend on the past history of medication adherence.
Variations :
Most of the time the voice interactions do not go as originally intended. Users do not always stick to the happy paths. They’re going to disrupt it with synonyms we don’t expect and combo-breakers that deviate from the script.
A synonym is a word or phrase that has the same or similar meaning to another word in the same language.
A combo-breaker is a way of describing the situation where a user responds to a question with a question, or with some other utterance that isn’t directly relevant. For example, if your friend asks, “Which restaurant would you like to visit?” and you respond “I don’t know, you pick.” that’s not answering the question, but it’s still indirectly relevant.
It is impossible to map paths for all these variations, hence I have tried to identify such synonyms (in orange) and combo-breakers (in green) and have written them on the margins of the script. Our goal at this point is to identify a few of the most probable situations where things might go off the rails. Here is an example.
