As voice innovation ends up being more and more popular, we’ll need to develop more and more voice apps.

In this post, I will review a basic overview for those who are not familiar with voice prototyping. It’s not a complex procedure but it is a bit various than the typical UI prototyping we frequently do for site or app.
1. Speech is a New Medium
Speech interactions aren’t as logical or direct as user streams within a website. A conversation can happen anywhere, anytime. On a site, a user can just go where you enable them to.

This also means that we have to realize that users do not communicate the someway when they write/text than when they speak. A discussion is ever streaming. And, although it can circle back to a previous point of information, a conversation doesn’t go backwards only forward.

Speech is a New Medium
It’s a different interaction when you’re looking up pizza deliveries on your phone vs asking Alex or Siri to buy one for you. It’s likewise a different experience when you misspell pizza in a Google search then when Alexa or Siri did not understand you. Keep this in mind when you’re creating for voice: you’re developing a conversation interface, designing it for how people speak not compose.

2. Producing a Persona
Begin by thinking about the role your voice app will play within the user experience of your users. What is their role? Next, you must ask yourself who is your persona? How does the personality of your voice app represent the brand?A voice application of any kind is an extension of your brand. You ought to first assess what the business’s brand name is and use these characteristics to define the persona of the voice app. Envision that your users are going to be engaging with an extension of your brand. It’s a brand-new but enjoyable and imaginative opportunity to delight your users or clients even further. It’s likewise a fantastic chance to develop a stronger bond in between your company and brand name and your users.

Identifying the characteristic of your personality will have an extensive result on how your users will view your voice app and your company. Is your voice personality female or male?

Producing a Persona
Finally, and whatever you do, the voice persona needs to be relatable for your users. Take a look at who your users are and what would be the most familiar to them.

3. Drawing Up Sample Dialogs
Next, you will require to suggest where a possible voice interaction could, would or need to take place within a user circulation. You will not have the ability to compose all of it out within a circulation the exact same way you can’t develop the mobile app pages within it either. A flow is a flow after all.

After suggesting where they take place, briefly describe the scenarios in which a voice interaction would happen. This will provide you a clear function of a voice interaction and a lot more context for composing out a sample dialog.

Below is a sample dialog.

User: I want to purchase a pizza.

Voice app: Hey Paula, no problem. I see you’ve bought the very same thing the last few times. Do you wish to order a large cheese pizza with an order of mozzarella stick again?User: Yeah, sure.

Voice app: Great. Do you desire us to deliver it to you in about 30 min or do you want to pick up in the store? It will be prepared for choice up in 10 min.

User: Deliver it to my home.

Voice app: The home address we have on file is 123 Alphabet Street is that right?

User: Yes it is.

Voice app: You got it. That’s going to be $15.79. Do you wish to pay with among the cards we have on file or cash on shipment?

User: with cash

Voice app: Your order has been placed and I’ve emailed you a confirmation. The shipment ought to arrive around 8:30 PM.

4. Voice Prototyping
Sadly, we’re into the prototyping phase! There are many tools out there however know that voice design is still a fairly new medium. There are just a handful of prototyping tools out there compared to the many website prototyping tools.

You can try among the following apps:

Thestoryline– an interface mapping tool for Alexa Skills.
Sayspring– voice interface tool for both Alexa and Google Assistant
Botsociety– multi-platform voice prototyping tool for Messenger, Slack, Alexa and Google Home
Dialogflow– for constructing natural discussion experiences
Document your dialogs
Each dialog should, at the extremely least, have a special name, type (an order, transfer, cancellation, etc), initiation (what prompts this specific dialog) and the outcome (what will this attain for the user? What can the user expect next?).

Mistake states
Mistakes are bound to take place for a verity of reasons, from the voice app not recognizing what the user said to the user not offering the proper details required to proceed.

The finest method to address mistakes when the user is not compliant is to supply progressive and useful instructions. You want to alleviate the problem and get the user to provide the correct information rather. If you’re asking a user for a date like a birthday or a credit card expiration, a user can tell you this details in a warty of ways such as with only numbers or a mixture of both numbers and words.

Furthermore, what if a user gets confused about how to provide the date? What if there is a long time out or an ‘ugh’ or an ‘ummmm …’? What do you do then?

Here is an example offered by Emily Grace Adiseshiah:

 

Voice app: What’s your date of birth?

User: Uh …

Voice app: Just inform me your date of birth using 2 digits for the month, 2 digits for the day, and 4 for the year.

Error states
Additionally, there are a couple of other problems to think about. What if a user is talking to a heavy accent, has a stutter, speaks silently or is in a noisy area. Once again, take these things into account respectively and ensure to make room for these specific issues within your model

Check your model.
The point of any model is to evaluate your concepts so go ahead and do that. Check your model with real people and see how well your voice app and the overall project is doing.

” The roadway to product splendor is littered with the broken bodies of those who didn’t want to– or believed they didn’t need to– evaluate their assumptions.”– James Fox What’s the Point of Prototyping?

Conclusion

In this post, we’ve covered the basic procedure of how to prototype voice interactions. Have you worked with voice prototyping before?