Design: Voice User Interface Design

Voice-first user experiences are now ubiquitous. Smart-speaker sales are up, as is their usage. Older adults are benefiting from the use of voice assistants. However, a large percentage of users still find the experience of talking to voice assistants unnatural. So how can we make voice experiences better?

While understanding conversation design–best practices is necessary, it’s not enough to make these conversations feel natural. To take your voice user interface (VUI) to the next level, you must add polish—in the form of pacing, sound effects, and diverse phrasings. Let’s take a look at each of these in turn. Read More

It’s a great time to be a voice user interface (VUI) designer. Voice user interfaces are becoming more and more common in our daily lives. To ensure great user experiences, it’s crucial that designers lead the way in this space.

Many visual designers and interaction designers who are interested in becoming VUI designers are well placed to switch from designing more traditional graphic user interfaces (GUIs) to designing VUIs. Although all UX design disciplines share certain principles, there are some things about VUI design that differ from GUI design for Web or mobile apps. In this article, I’ll cover the main things you should keep in mind when designing VUIs. Read More

This is an excerpt from Chapter 9 of Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences, by Cheryl Platz. 2020 Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 9: Lost in Transition

One constant in truly multimodal systems is change. When you could assume a customer would remain in the same context for the duration of an interaction, the only change that designers had to consider was the change in the customer state enabled by the user interface (UI). Don’t want a change? Then don’t build an affordance for that change. Simple.

Multimodal systems are defined by their flexibility. Without the ability to transition between inputs and outputs, all a multimodal system provides is a single choice up front about an engagement. It’s essentially several mutually exclusive single-mode interactions. Read More