Designing Voice User Interfaces

Chapter 7. Your Voice User Interface Is Finished! Now What?

YOU’VE DONE IT! You’ve designed and developed your voice user interface (VUI)!

Now what?

It would be wonderful to be able to stop there, put your app out into the wild, and reap the benefits and rewards. But it’s more complicated than that. For one thing, you need to ensure that everything has been thoroughly tested. Then, after you’ve launched, you need to actually verify whether your system is working. Fortunately, there are standardized methods for tracking and analyzing your system’s performance, and you can use that information to tune and improve your VUI.

This chapter describes some VUI-specific testing activities, gets into detail about what needs to be logged, and provides instructions on what to do with all that data.

Prerelease Testing

First, let’s get into testing. Presumably your app has by this point gone through some regular testing methods, making sure it works on different devices; you have run usability tests, and completed basic QA. Now let’s talk about VUI-specific testing.

Dialog Traversal Testing

One type of testing that’s crucial for VUIs is something that the interactive voice response (IVR) system world calls Dialog Traversal Testing (DTT). In this case, a “dialog” refers to a state in your conversational flow, usually one question followed by a user’s response. It includes all transitions, error prompts, help prompts, or anything else that could happen at that state.

Here’s a description from Voice User ...