The Elements of Voice First Style

Chapter 9. The UI Use Case Fit

We all know how crucial the product-market fit is to the viability, let alone the success, of a product. Build a product that is a natural fit for tween girls, market it to busy moms, and you will likely end up with a failed product, no matter how sweet the product or how slick and well-financed the marketing push.

In fact, the number one mistake that startups make is neglecting this basic first step: they start building something with a vague notion, if any, of who the ideal target user is, and then delve into the fun work of ideating and building features and creating lots of cool bells and whistles; then they launch to the world at large, expecting it to embrace their beautiful baby. Often, they neglect to delve into fundamental questions such as: Who is the target user? What problem are we solving for such users (or what additional value are we bringing to their life)? And how are we going to monetize the value we are delivering for them, and do so to the extent that will enable us to survive and thrive as a company (i.e., price the product so the company is profitable)?

A parallel mistake often made by builders of voice experiences is building a voicebot without first asking the basic question: Is the voicebot a good fit for the use case? Instead, many builders delve into the hard work of designing and coding up their voicebot, laboring under the unspoken assumption that given any use case, if a GUI experience exists for that use case (a website, ...