Age of Invisible Machines

CHAPTER 15Design Strategy for Hyperautomation

I've noted how conversation is the most natural way for humans to connect with one another and accomplish shared goals. Even though communicating conversationally is second nature to most people, designing conversational experiences isn't as easy as you might expect. In a regular one-on-one conversation with another human, you say something and get immediate feedback, whether it's verbal, nonverbal, or both, That feedback tells you what to do or say next. When designing a conversation for an IDW, you're tasked with creating one side of an interaction and making your best guesses as to what the likely responses might include. It can be extremely difficult to do this well, but you get better at figuring out the best ways to design interactions by moving through the create-test-improve loop at a rapid pace.

It's a bit like generating new material as a comedian. You can come up with jokes you think are good, but you won't know if they're funny or not until you test them on live audiences. The key difference is that, once the best jokes are identified and honed, the comedian's work on them is done for the most part. The material is presented in a one-sided format, and the only follow-up to consider is the next joke. But conversational design is two-sided, and so these interactions can take many different turns based on the different ways different users reply. Each subsequent turn might lead to a new set of choices, so the complexity ...