Thread by @RohanIrvine

Next up is Phillip Hunter — strategies for conversational interfaces.

#UXA2019 #uxaustralia

Let's talk about being human.

Those who are blessed or cursed to talk speak about 16000 words a day.

Not all of those are consequential but we use a lot.

Teens and adults shares 1300 messages on devices per day.

Is you're using email it's about 100 emails a day.

Conversation is a huge component of our lives.

How many of you feel confident going into conversations with a loved one, a boss or someone youve had a disagreement with?

We may feel confident, but even when you're confident you many not know how you can have those conversations.

We can learn these lessons and still not know how they work in practice.

Because we a beings of meaning when we interact with machines in a conversational way (not just voice it's the richness of the things we communicate back and forth) we are doing it for a number of ways.

Conversation is the human interface

Meaning requires multiple levels of context.

However we don't think about what makes up that meaning.

Culture, visual signals, the environment we are in. All of these bring meaning to the conversation we're having.

When we use conversation it's detailed, complex, subtle.

Today machines aren't doing this, they are ignoring it.

There is a mutual responsibility when we engage in a conversational.

How often do you walk away from a conversation thinking you're both on the same page until you come back a week later and realise you had completely different concepts.

Think of what it means that we need to work so hard to have shared meaning between each other while our machines are not yet built to put the same amount of understanding when we interact with them.

Context changes with relationship.

Same words, different context.

Our conversational technology is bypassing this and not taking it into account.

We aren't taking care of the human issues of connecting around meaning with our converational technology.

Conversational tech terms and their meaning.

These terminologies mimic what we do with each other already.

The interesting thing about talking about this is we are changing the definition of conversation from happening between 2 or more humans to happening between 2 or more things.

The strange can be strange until its useful or accepted by us.

What does it mean to design for these products?

Designing Conversations.

Everything is a guess, there is no such thing as 100% accuracy in any system.

Your job is to design one half of a conversation where you're trying your best to see what the application can understand.

It is a constant negotiation.

When designing voice and conversation you have to be comfortable using words and designing words.

5 tech strategies for conversation

1. Don't make me think you're thinking I'm thinking.

We have a tendency to think the other person is thinking.

We don't actually think much when we talk.

We are really good at conversation, we are constructing our response in milliseconds, there are few long pauses.

When we interact with these systems we don't know what the system is and isn't aware of.

When we design them we need to be able to store or follow the conversation.

When we present information from a speech system we are dealing with people who need predictability.

We need to be flexible with our conversation.

It needs to be able to repair a conversation. "I didn't catch what you just said" is an example of repairing.

In natural conversation it happens about every 84 seconds across languages and cultures.

It's such a natural part of our conversation that we don't even realise we do it.

This is not how our speech systems are built.

Principles and guidelines to apply for Startegy 1.

2. People who need psudeo-people

We love other people.

Sometimes we can only understand things by humanizing them.

Raise your hand if you've never yelled at your computer (no hands)

We treat things as people, we put faves on toast.

This is an incomplete list of eveything actually said when you say.

"The coffee here is good"
"It is"

Bruce's principles about how we decide what we say in a conversation.

Quality
Quantity
Relevance
Manner

There are things that make meaningful conversation and we can apply them to our design as well.

How we create the conversations that are useful and meaningful.

3. Love, Love me Do

We don't necessarily feel offended by bad interactions with apps.

This changes when we interact with a conversational tech we expect to do something for us.

Something that annoys Phillip is articles like "Are your kids being rude to Siri"

These systems are not designed to be good to you.

The level of care for the person interacting with the technology has to high enough for us to treat it nicely.

There are basic conversations we can have with each other that our conversational tech cannot reproduce.

Handling failure and turning failure into not failure is critical and we have to be able to do that in our technology before we should be treating it nicely.

Our technology is made as an MVP so what we get is not what it could be. The invisible systems hide what they're capable of and we should be building them to the standard we require.

Principles and guidelines for strategy 3.

4. Yada Yada don't say that.

Language is alive and it changes.

How do we write better interactions using machines.

This is based on Mr Rogers principles for taking with children.

5. Yea can I walkbthriugh the valley of the shadow of the death star.

Take what I've said—but this is a craft.

Make experiences that feel like we're being treated as humans.

Build things people love and want to interact with.

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