Designing Voice User Interfaces

Chapter 2. Basic Voice User Interface Design Principles

THIS CHAPTER GETS RIGHT into best practices for designing today’s voice user interfaces (VUIs). It covers what conversational design means and the best way to achieve it. This includes knowing the best way to confirm information spoken by a user, whether your system should be command-and-control style versus conversational; how to handle novice versus expert users; and, especially important, designing for when things go wrong.

This book is focused on designing VUIs for mobile apps and devices. To set the stage, let’s look at the original VUIs—interactive voice response (IVR) systems—and see what’s different about them.

Designing for Mobile Devices Versus IVR Systems

In the early 2000s, IVR systems were becoming more common. Initially primitive touch-tone/voice hybrids (“Please press or say 1”), they became an expected way to communicate with many companies. IVRs could help callers get stock quotes, book flights, transfer money, and provide traffic information. Many of them were designed poorly, and websites popped up with backdoors on how to get transferred immediately to an operator (something many companies actively tried to hide). IVRs acquired a bad reputation, ending up the subject of satire on Saturday Night Live.

IVR systems were created to automate tasks so that customers would not always need to speak to a live person to get things done. They were created before the Internet became commonly used and before smartphones ...