A guide for the Voice User Interface(VUI) design

Published in

Bootcamp

3 min readOct 21, 2020

What is VUI?

Voice User Interface is an interface which enables voice interaction between human and devices. Visuals can be added as a complement to give a better understanding of users in some cases.

Advantages of VUI:

While talking about the advantages of VUI, there are endless possibilities to explore, one of them is making the uneducated people perform complex tasks, making the old aged mobile users explore more options in mobile. Imagine driving a car with VUI or writing code with VUI in future!, Voice interface is a great power to enhance digital experiences.

Process of VUI:

1) User Research:

User research is the most important process to identify problems and pain points of users. Identifying and understanding the user needs and pain points helps to propose a better solution for user problems. Customer journey mapping helps to understand the pain points in various phases.

2) Competitor Analysis:

The feature available in competitors product should be analysed completely before starting to design. The most important factors to be analysed in the competitor’s product as stated by Frederik Goossens are listed below,

i. What are the use cases of the app?

ii. What voice command do they use?

iii. What are the customer reviews?

3) Designing persona for the voice interface:

Humans appreciate companionship and guidance, they personalise these voice interfaces as well. So it is important to understand the emotion projected by the voice interface. Understanding the persona of the voice interface includes three main factors as mentioned by Arun George in his article are given below,

i) The Role:

The role that needs to be taken by the voice should be decided previously, this is based on different use cases, For example, Deciding whether the voice interface is going to act as an expert giving suggestions and helps to make better decisions or is it going to be an assistant doing the command.

ii) Company Brand:

Before deciding the voice, the brand should be understood completely, brand personality must resonate with the voice. The tone, emotion and depth of the voice should be decided after understanding the brand identity.

iii) Familiarity & Target Audience:

The voice and the accent should be chosen based on the target audience, For example, not all the different accents of English can be understood by everyone.

4) Designing VUI dialogue:

Source: Voice User Interfaces (VUI) — The Ultimate Designer’s Guide by Justin Baker

The most important and common scenarios that need to be framed first, there are different ways to ask for the same action, try different possibilities to frame sentences for defining single action.

Conversational dialogue:

The most important thing that needs to be considered while designing is the dialogue should be conversational, most of the chatbots available online are written question, which means there is a difference between talking to someone and writing a letter to someone. The written format may not capture much emotion, while the conversation can express the emotion effectively.

5) Prototyping:

There are few products available online to make prototypes for voice interfaces. Find some of them here.

Resources:

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