Designing Voice User Interfaces

Chapter 6. User Testing for Voice User Interfaces

AS WITH ANY TYPE OF APPLICATION DESIGN, user testing is extremely important when creating voice user interfaces (VUIs). There are many similarities to testing regular mobile apps, but there are differences, as well. This chapter outlines practical ways (from cheap to more expensive) to get your VUI tested, how to interview your subjects, and how to measure success. It will enable VUI designers to immediately execute user testing at even early stages of development. It will focus primarily on VUI-specific methodologies.

Special VUI Considerations

Generally speaking, it is preferable not to reveal to the users at the start of testing that the system uses speech recognition up front (unless they would know this by the app description when downloading it in the real world, or from marketing). One of the important things to determine during testing is whether users understand that they can talk to the system. Do they know how, or when?

I have observed people failing to speak when speech was allowed because it was not at all obvious that they could speak. Some of these users later commented, “I sure wish I could speak there!” Obviously, the design needed some work, but I might not have discovered this had I explicitly informed them that they could always speak to the app from the outset.

A common strategy with GUI testing is asking people to narrate what they’re doing, which obviously won’t work when testing a real VUI system.

If you already ...