Voice UX
How we understand Voice UX
As experience designers (UX) and linguists, we always acknowledge how users express their needs.
Our vision for voice design and voice development is to create voice UX that helps them solve their requests through an intuitive conversation. And we follow that principle, even when it means challenging the boundaries of technology.
Good voice UX starts with understanding users in the most literal way.
Good voice UX means letting users own the conversation to solve their needs. Ultimately, good voice UX means creating charismatic Conversational AI. Charismatic AI, for us, is characterized through presence, power, and benevolence.
This is why we design and develop charismatic conversational partners to do great voice projects.
How we approach premium Voice User Experience Design
1 / VUX Research
Proper research sets the baseline for every good user experience. The research needs to be conducted on three different fronts: first, brand and personality. Second, use cases; and third, benchmarking.
Who are you, what are your values, and what is your goal? This is the phase for Co-creation and definition of use cases and the conversational partners: the user persona and the assistant persona. This is where we at VUI help you find your Conversational Branding and design a charismatic conversational interface.
Who are your users, and what type of interface do they need to fulfill each use case? This is where we identify the right touchpoints and language for the interaction, where we take care of the accessibility and discoverability of your product or service.
2 / Conversation Design
Once we set the baseline, we design our interaction's flow ('the skeleton' and 'skin') through our Voice UX expertise and creativity.
How does the backend support and enhance the experience? We design the best experience and provide support and consultancy for implementing a custom-built or platform-based interaction.
How are we protecting your company and your users? Our experts advise you on the best ways of keeping user data safe.
What possible blockers can your users encounter? We consider possible errors and plan how to avoid them or design an elegant solution if they are unavoidable.
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3 / Analytics and optimization
To keep improving the conversational interaction experience, it needs constant maintenance and updates. At this point, we've done the hard part. But from here, we can help you make sure you always meet user needs and expectations. A charismatic Conversational AI learns and adapts to improve its conversational skills and be an excellent conversational partner to users.
We regularly check our design hypotheses and adapt recognition, development, language, and flow according to what users need.
We constantly investigate the potential to enhance and/or optimize the user experience based on data analytics.
Our visionary ingredients of premium Voice UX
Challenge Technology
Like any other UX design, an unbiased, inclusive, user-centric, and safe Voice UX design needs a good amount of creativity. Good Voice UX needs designers’ creativity to provide flexible voice flows to keep the conversation alive and be goal-oriented and valuable.
It also requires the linguists’ creativity to teach the machine how to understand users and express personality. And it’s the voice developers’ job to provide a stable architecture and combine all the different components of a conversational interface to follow that idea of natural human conversation. For excellent voice UX, we use all our creativity to challenge technology.
We’re always searching for the best technology-agnostic components to create a charismatic AI with a good conversational partner.
Voice First and Conversational First
We like to refer to a conversation-first approach to understand human-machine interaction in a broader conversational context.
Voice-first means designing and implementing a system with various input modalities for users, where voice is always the first and preferred input. Naturally, if the plan is to follow voice first, every other input mode depends on voice.
We don’t want to exclude written language (chatbot) or to put order into input modes until users have chosen their most intuitive and natural way of interacting.
Multimodality
We are voice enthusiasts but like to follow a multimodal UX vision for users. We use multimodality in two contexts: to describe different input modalities for user interfaces (e.g., voice, touch, and gestures) and for output modalities (e.g., voice prompts and screens).
Every use case needs different modalities or different combinations of them to make human-machine interaction intuitive for users. We strive for great multimodal experiences and see them as a collaborative work between linguists, sound UX designers, UX experts, UI experts, visual designers, voice designers, and voice developers.
For a good voice UX, it is essential to support it by non-verbal interaction in a conversation.
For us, Charismatic Conversational AI relies on multimodality and follows an inclusive voice-first approach.
